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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 



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OyO^uJirhy- 



WILLIAM LLOYD 
GARRISON 



BY 

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



FRONTISPIECE 



NEW YORK 
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

1913 



Qzs 



Copyright, 1913, by 
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



All iKights Renewed 



©CI.A3 4 658 9 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I Introduction 



II The Background ..... 8 

III The Figure 33 

IV Pictures of the Struggle . . 58 
V The Crisis 96 

VI Retrospect and Prospect . .133 

VII The Man of Action .... 187 

VIII The Rynders Mob .... 198 

IX Garrison and Emerson . . .218 

X Foreign Influence: Summary 240 

Epilogue 263 



page 
I 



WILLIAM LLOYD 
GARRISON 

I 

INTRODUCTION 

The periods of history that are most inter- 
esting are those which have been lighted up 
by spiritual bonfires. As we read about 
such epochs we seem to feel the fires re- 
kindling in our bosom. Through the iden- 
tity of those historic flames with our own, we 
become aware of our portion in the past, and 
of our mission in the present. The names 
of the actors, to be sure, are changed; the 
names of the forces at work vary con- 
tinually. Yet the substance of the story is 
ever the same ; the fable deals with ourselves. 
And therefore that fable stirs the intimate 
embers in us. Here, within us, are those 
smothered and banked furnaces which the 
stride of History has left behind it, — the 
only now living part, the only real part and 
absolute remnant of the divine pageant. 
There are some periods of great confla- 
I 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

gration where a whole epoch is lighted up 
with one great flame of idea, which takes 
perhaps a few decades to arise, blaze, and 
fall; during which time it shows all men in 
its glare. Willy nilly they can be and are 
seen by this light and by no other. Willy 
nilly their chief interest for the future lies 
in their relation to this idea. In spite of 
themselves they are thrilling, illustrative 
figures, seen in lurid and logical distortion, 
— abstracts and epitomes of human life. 
Nay, they stand forever as creatures that 
have been caught and held, cracked open, 
thrown living upon a screen, burned alive 
perhaps by a searching and terrible bonfire 
and recorded in the act, — as the citizens of 
Pompeii were recorded by the eruption of 
Mount Vesuvius. 

It happened that a period of this kind 
passed over the United States between the 
years 1830 and 1865. There is nothing to 
be found in that epoch which does not draw 
its significance, its interest, its permanent 
power from the slavery question. There 
is no man whose life falls within that epoch 
whose character was not controlled by that 
question, or whose portrait can be seen by 
any other light than the light of that fire. 
Subtract that light and you have darkness; 



INTRODUCTION 

you cannot see the man at all. In the biog- 
raphies of certain distinguished conserva- 
tives of that time you may often observe 
the softening of the portrait by the omission 
of unpleasant records, the omission by the 
biographers of those test judgments and 
test ordeals v^ith which the times were well 
supplied. By these omissions the man van- 
ishes from the page of his own book. The 
page grows suddenly blank. You check 
yourself and wonder who it was that you 
were reading about. Now the reason of 
this disappearance of the leading character 
from your mind is that the biographer has 
drawn someone who could not have existed. 
The man must have answered aye or nay 
to the question which the times were put- 
ting. And, in fact, he did so answer. By 
this answer he could have been seen. With- 
out it he does not exist. 

I confess that I had rather stand out for 
posterity in a hideous silhouette, as having 
been wrong on every question of my time, 
than be erased into a cypher by my biog- 
rapher. But biographers do not feel in this 
way toward their heroes. Each one feels 
that he has undertaken to do his best by his 
patron. Therefore they stand the man un- 
der a north light in a photographer's attic, 
3 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

suggest his attitude, and thus take the pic- 
ture; — whereas, in real life, the man was 
standing on the balcony of a burning build- 
ing which the next moment collapsed, and 
in it he was crushed beyond the semblance 
of humanity. The Civil War, — that war 
with its years of interminable length, its 
battles of such successive and monstrous 
carnage, its dragged-out reiterations of hor- 
ror and agony, and its even worse tortures 
of hope deferred, — hope all but extinct, — 
that war of which it is impossible to read 
even a summary without becoming so worn 
out by distress that you forget ever3d;hing 
that went before in the country's history 
and emerge, as it were, a new man at the 
close of your perusal ; — that war was no ac- 
cident. It was involved in every syllable 
which every inhabitant of America uttered 
or neglected to utter in regard to the slavery 
question between 1830 and i860. The 
gathering and coming on of that war, its 
vaporous distillation from the breath of 
every man, its slow, inevitable formation in 
the sky, its retreats and apparent dispersals, 
its renewed visibilities, — all of them gov- 
erned by some inscrutable logic, — and its 
final descent in lightning and deluge ; — these 
matters make the history of the interval be- 
4 



INTRODUCTION 

tween 1830 and 1865. That history is all 
one galvanic throb, one course of human 
passion, one Nemesis, one deliverance. 
And with the assassination of Lincoln in 
1865 there falls from on high the great, uni- 
fying stroke that leaves the tragedy sublime. 
No poet ever invented such a scheme of 
curse, so all-involving, so remotely rising in 
an obscure past and holding an entire nation 
in its mysterious bondage, — a scheme based 
on natural law, led forward and unfolded 
from mood to mood, from climax to climax, 
and plunging at the close into the depths of 
a fathomless pity. The action of the drama 
is upon such a scale that a quarter of the 
earth has to be devoted to it. Yet the argu- 
ment is so trite that it will hardly bear state- 
ment. Perhaps the true way to view the 
whole matter is to regard it as the throwing 
off by healthy morality of a little piece of 
left over wickedness, — ^that bad heritage of 
antiquity, domestic slavery. The logical and 
awful steps by which the process went for- 
ward merely exhibit familiar, moral, and 
poetic truth. What else could they exhibit? 
We are ungrateful to the intellects of the 
past; or rather, like children we take it for 
granted that somebody must supply us with 
our supper and our ideas ; and, for the most 
5 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

part, it is difficult to discover the extent of 
our indebtedness, whether, for example, to 
Charlemagne or to the scholars who have re- 
vealed him. Yet everything we know and 
live by is due to the mind of someone in the 
past: its formulation, at any rate, was the 
act of a man. 

These same illuminations of history that 
we have been speaking of were due to the 
enlightenment of individual minds. Our 
Revolution of 1776 was made interesting 
by its state papers, and to-day our knowl- 
edge of that time is a knowledge of the 
minds of Washington, Franklin, and the 
other patriots. Now the light by which we 
to-day see the Anti-slavery period was first 
shed on it by one man — William Lloyd 
Garrison. That slavery was wrong, every- 
one knew in his heart. The point seen by 
Garrison was the practical point that the 
slavery issue was the only thing worth 
thinking about, and that all else must be 
postponed till slavery was abolished. He 
saw this by a God-given act of vision in 
1829; and it was true. The history of the 
spread of this idea of Garrison's is the his- 
tory of the United States during the thirty 
years after it loomed in his mind. From 
the day Garrison established the Lib- 
6 



INTRODUCTION 

erator he was the strongest man in America. 
He was affected in his thought by no one. 
What he was thinking, all men were des- 
tined to think. How had he found that 
clew and skeleton-key to his age, which put 
him in possession of such terrible power? 
What he hurled in the air went everywhere 
and smote all men. Tide and tempest served 
him. His power of arousing uncontrol- 
lable disgust was a gift, like magic; and 
he seems to sail upon it as a demon upon the 
wind. Not Andrew Jackson, nor John 
Quincy Adams, nor Webster, nor Clay, nor 
Benton, nor Calhoun, — who dance like 
shadows about his machine, — but William 
Lloyd Garrison becomes the central figure in 
American life. 

If one could see a mystical presentation 
of the epoch, one would see Garrison as a 
Titan, turning a giant grindstone or elec- 
trical power-wheel, from which radiated vi- 
brations in larger and in ever larger, more 
communicative circles and spheres of agita- 
tion, till there was not a man, woman, or 
child in America who was not a-tremble. 

We know, of course, that the source of 

these radiations was not in Garrison. They 

came from the infinite and passed out into 

the infinite. Had there been no Garrison 

7 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

they would somehow have arrived and at 
some time would have prevailed. But his- 
torically speaking they did actually pass 
through Garrison: he vitalized and perma- 
nently changed this nation as much as one 
man ever did the same for any nation in the 
history of the world. 



II 

THE BACK-GROUND 

Let us consider the first fifty years of our 
national history. There was never a mo- 
ment during this time when the slavery is- 
sue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue 
lay coiled up under the table during the de- 
liberations of the Constitutional Convention 
in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of 
the cotton gin, more than half awake at the 
time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 ; and 
slavery was continued in the Louisiana ter- 
ritory by the terms of the treaty. There- 
after slavery was always in everyone's 
mind, though not always on his tongue. A 
slave state and a free state were, as a matter 
of practice, always admitted in pairs. Thus, 
Vermont and Kentucky, Tennessee and 
Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi 
and Illinois, had each been offset against 
the other. This was to preserve the balance 
of power. The whole country, however, 
was in a state of unstable equilibrium and 
9 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

the era of good feeling oscillated upon the 
top of a craggy peak. 

At last, in 1818-20, came two years of 
fierce, open struggle over slavery in the ad- 
mission of Missouri, which state was 
formed from part of the Louisiana Pur- 
chase. Southern threats of disunion clashed 
with Northern taunts of defiance in the 
House of Representatives. In the outcome, 
the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri 
zuith slavery; and prohibited slavery in that 
part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay 
north of the latitude of 36° 30', except in the 
portion included in Missouri. This com- 
promise became, in the public mind, as sacred 
as the Constitution itself; so that when, in 
1854, the Compromise was repealed, the 
whole North felt that the bottom had 
dropped out of their government. The 
North believed itself to be betrayed. The 
savage feeling which led up to war developed 
rapidly at the North after this time. The 
war came as the final outcome of a great 
malady. But we must return to 1820. 

During the decade that followed the Mis- 
souri Compromise everyone in America fell 
sick. It was not a sickness that kept men 
in bed. They went about their business, — 
the lawyer to court, the lady to pay calls, the 
10 



THE BACK-GROUND 

merchant to his wharf. The amusements, 
and the religious, literary, and educational 
occupations of mankind went forward as 
usual. But they all went forward under 
the gradually descending fringe of a mist, 
an unwholesome-feeling cloud of oppres- 
sion. No one could say why it was that his 
food did not nourish him quite as it used to 
do, nor his unspoken philosophy of life any 
longer cover the needs of his nature. This 
was especially strange, because everybody 
ought to have been perfectly happy. Had 
not the country emerged from the War of 
the Revolution in the shape of a new and 
glorious Birth of Time, — a sample to all 
mankind ? Had it not survived the dangers 
of the second war with Great Britain? And 
what then remained for us except to go for- 
ward victoriously and become a splendid, 
successful, vigorous, and benevolent people? 
Everything was settled that concerned the 
stability of our form of government. The 
future could surely contain nothing except 
joyous progress. 

The Americans of 1820-30 expounded the 
glorious nature of their own destiny. 
They challenged the casual visitor to deny 
it; and became quite noted for their insist- 
ence upon this claim, and for their deter- 
II 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

mination to secure the acknowledgment of it 
by all men. 

At the bottom of this nervous concern 
there was not, as is generally supposed, 
merely the bumptious pride and ignorance 
of a new nation. There was something 
more complex and more honorable; there 
was an inner knowledge that none of these 
things were true. This knowledge was 
forced upon our fathers by their familiarity 
with their own political literature and with 
the Declaration of Independence in partic- 
ular. There was a chasm between the 
agreeable statement that all men are created 
free and equal, and the horrible fact of hu- 
man slavery. The thought of this incon- 
gruity troubled every American. No 
recondite or difficult reasoning was re- 
quired to produce the mental anguish 
that now began to oppress America. The 
only thing necessary was leisure for anguish, 
and this leisure first became possible at the 
close of the second war with Great Britain. 
The operation of the thought was almost en- 
tirely unconscious, and its issue in pain al- 
most entirely unexpressed. 

The articulate classes had not talked much 
about slavery since the days of the consti- 
tutional compromises, and it is the aged Jef- 

12 



THE BACK-GROUND 

ferson who writes from Monticello apropos 
of the Missouri Compromise, — " This 
momentous question, like a fire-bell in the 
night, awakened and filled me with terror. 
I considered it at once the knell of the 
Union." 

Now there never was a moment in the 
history of the country when this fire-bell 
was quite silent. The educational policy 
of the articulate classes of society during 
the first fifty years of the Nation's life had 
been to hush the bell. 

Ever since the Southern members in the 
Constitutional Convention had showed their 
teeth, and threatened to withdraw if slavery 
were disturbed, a policy of silence had been 
adopted. The questions covered by the 
Constitution were to be regarded as con- 
clusively settled. The bandages must never 
be taken off them. Any person who re- 
views the history of the American Revolu- 
tion can sympathize with this timidity; for 
it seems Hke a miracle that the Colonies 
should ever have come together, — so an- 
tagonistic were their interests, and their 
ideals. The Colonists feared some new 
breach, and there ensued a non-intellectual 
determination that certain questions should 
not be re-examined: this determination 
13 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

gradually grew into our great stupefying 
dogma which says to the private citizen, 
" This is our way of doing things : you-be- 
damned : intellect has nothing to do with the 
matter: it is American." This dogma, 
which arose out of the needs of our early 
days, has become the most widespread form 
of metaphysical faith among us. No doubt 
all nations harbor similar prejudices as to 
their own institutions; but the nations of 
Europe have been jostled into liberalism by 
their contiguity one with another; and the 
jostling is now being extended to us. Dur- 
ing our early history, however, we were iso- 
lated, and our intellectual classes took their 
American history a little too seriously. The 
state of mind of our statesmen and scholars 
in that epoch is well summed up in Web- 
ster's reply to Hayne. That speech closes 
an epoch. It is the great paving-stone of 
conclusive demonstration, placed upon the 
mouth of a natural spring. 

All this while something had been left out 
in all the nation's political and social phi- 
losophy — something which policy forbade 
men to search for, and this something was 
beginning to move in the pit of the stomach 
of Americans, and to make them feel ex- 
ceedingly and vaguely ill. In order to bind 
14 



THE BACK-GROUND 

the Colonies into a more lasting union, a 
certain suppression of truth, a certain tram- 
pling upon instinct had been resorted to in 
the Constitution. All the parties to that 
instrument thoroughly understood the in- 
iquity of slavery and deplored it. All the 
parties were ashamed of slavery and yet felt 
obliged to perpetuate it. They wrapped up 
a twenty years' protection of the African 
slave trade in a colorless phrase. 

** The migration or importation of such 
persons as any of the states now existing 
shall think proper to admit, shall not be 
prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 
one thousand eight hundred and eight, but 
a tax or duty may be imposed on such im- 
portations, not exceeding ten dollars for 
each person." 

Now the slave trade meant the purchase 
upon African coasts of negroes and ne- 
gresses, their branding, herding, manacling, 
and transportation between decks across 
tropical seas. The African slave trade is 
probably the most brutal organized-crime in 
history. Our fathers did not dare to name 
It. So of the fugitive slave law; — the 
Constitution deals with it in the cruel, quiet 
way in which monstrous tyranny deals with 
the fictions of administrative law. " No 
15 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

person held to service or labor in one state 
under the laws thereof, escapmg into another, 
shall, in consequence of any law or regula- 
tion therein, be discharged from such serv- 
ice or labor; but shall be delivered up on 
claim of the party to whom such service or 
labor may be due." 

In an age in which the Inquisition is abso- 
lutely dominant, its officials are almost kind. 
The leaden touch of hypocrisy was thus in 
the heart of our Constitution. Cold-heart- 
edness radiated from the Ark of our 
Covenant. We condone this because we 
know that many of these fathers really 
did believe that slavery was probably going 
to diminish and die out in the country. 
Even while protecting it they hoped for the 
best, and knew not what they did. But as 
slavery became more important instead of 
less important, and as the cruelty of it be- 
came more visible, the bond of the document 
pressed upon the conscience of the people. 
We had undertaken more than we could per- 
form. The suppression of truth, the tramp- 
ling upon instinct, which we had accepted 
as a duty, was stifling us. For the first 
fifty years of our national life no reaction 
was visible. And then there ensued a fer- 
mentation, a tumult in the heart which noth- 
i6 



THE BACK-GROUND 

ing could quell. This tumult began long 
before it showed itself. Its dialectic and 
logic were developed and ready for use, like 
the wangs of the locust in the shell. The na- 
tures of men were beginning to heave and 
to swell — and at last, when Garrison speaks 
out, behold, he is in electrical communica- 
tion with an age over-charged with passion. 
His thought is understood immediately. 
Every implication, every consequence, every 
remote contingency has been anticipated in 
the public consciousness, and there ensues 
explosion after explosion: crash generates 
crash: storm routes of continuous passion 
plow the heavens across the continent from 
sea to sea. In truth our whole civilization, 
our social life, our religious feelings, our 
political ideas, had all become accommo- 
dated to cruelty, representative of tyranny. 
The gigantic backbone of business-interest 
was a slavery backbone. We were a slave 
republic. For a generation, nay, for two 
hundred years, we had tolerated slavery; 
and for a generation it had been a sacred 
thing, — a man must suppress his feelings in 
speaking of it. 

Now there is nothing more injurious to 
the character and to the intellect than the 
suppression of generous emotion. It means 
17 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

death: — sickness to the individual, Wight to 
the race. Compassion shining through the 
heart wears the very name and face of Di- 
vine Life. It makes the limbs strong and 
the mind capable ; it strengthens the stomach 
and supports the intestines. Cramp this 
emotion, and you will have a half-dead man, 
whose children will be less well-nourished 
than himself. 

It is hard to imagine the falsetto condi- 
tion of life in the Northern States in 1829; 
— the lack of spontaneity and naturalness 
about everybody, so far as externals went, 
and the presence of extreme solicitude in 

^ the bottom of everybody's heart. Emerson 
speaks in his journal (1834) of the fine man- 
ners of the young Southerners, brought up 
amidst slavery, and of the deference which 
Northerners, both old and young, habitually 
paid to the people of the South. It seems 
to have been regarded as a social duty at the 
North to shield the feelings of Southerners, 
and, as it were, to apologize for not owning 

/ slaves. The feelings of the Northern phi- 
lanthropist, however, were never regarded 
with delicacy. On the contrary it was 
thought to be his duty to suppress his feel- 
ings. Any exhibition of humane sentiment 
where slavery was concerned, — and it was 
18 



THE BACK-GROUND 

always concerned, — was punished immedi- 
ately. The most natural impulses, the most 
simple acts of human piety could be indulged 
in only through an initiation of fierce pain, 
generally followed by social ostracism. The 
right to draw one's breath involved a strug- 
gle with Apollyon. 

" Only a few days before one of our meet- 
ings," writes Henry I. Bowditch, one of 
Garrison's early recruits from the social 
world of Boston, " a young lady had hoped 
that I * would never become an Abolitionist ' 
and about the same time Frederick Doug- 
lass appeared as a runaway slave. He was 
at the meeting in Marlboro' Chapel. Of 
course I was introduced to him, and, as I 
would have invited a white friend, I asked 
him home to dine with me in my small abode 
in Bedford Street. It is useless to deny that 
I did not like the thought of walking with 
him in open midday up Washington Street. 
I hoped I would not meet any of my ac- 
quaintances. I had, however, hardly turned 
into the street before I met the young lady 
who had expressed her wish as above stated. 
I am glad now to say that I did not skidk. 
I looked at her straight and bowed in * my 
most gracious manner ^ as if I were * all 
right,' while I saw by her look of regret that 
19 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

she thought me * all wrong.' It was, how- 
ever, something like a cold sponge-bath, — 
that Washington Street walk by the side of 
a black man, — rather terrible at the outset, 
but wonderfully warming and refreshing 
afterwards! I had literally jumped 'in 
medias res.' But I did not hear until years 
afterwards, and a long time after Douglass 
had held office in Washington under Federal 
Government, and the slavery of his own race 
had been washed out in blood, what I was 
doing for him at the moment that as a friend 
I asked him to walk home with me to dinner. 
How little do we appreciate acts that seem 
trivial or something worse to us, but which 
to others, affected by such acts, are of in- 
dispensable importance! Beautiful to me 
seems now the act, inasmuch as it helped to 
raise a poor, down-trodden soul into a 
proper self-appreciation. And how much I 
thank God that He led me by giving me a 
love of freedom, and something like a con- 
science to act as I did then." * 

The strain of that walk upon Bowditch 

* Many years afterwards, when an assemblage of 
anti-slavery veterans and hosts of young colored 
men were honoring Frederick Douglass in a public 
hall in Boston, he alluded to this incident with the 
remark, "Dr. Bowditch I greet joyfully here, for he 
first treated me as if I were a man'* 

20 



THE BACK-GROUND 

is felt forty years later in his account of it. 
The profound political instinct which led 
him to take the walk is as noticeable as the 
religious nature of his impulse. It is won- 
derful to reflect how little the significance 
of the act could have been understood by 
any casual observer of the scene. Here is 
a man who turns down one street rather 
than another, upon meeting an acquaintance. 
He looks like a gentleman doing an act of 
politeness ; while he is, in fact, a saint going 
through the fire for his faith, and a hero sav- 
ing the republic. So banal are externals, so 
deep is reality. But our present interest in 
the incident lies in this, — that it measures 
the separation of Massachusetts from the 
ordinary standards of Europe. Frederick 
Douglass was almost a man of genius and 
he looked like a man of genius. His photo- 
graph at the time of his escape from slav- 
ery might be the photograph of a musician 
or a painter. He was the kind of man who, 
in a Paris or London salon, would excite 
anyone's passing notice, as perhaps a South 
American diplomat or artist. 

An intelligent foreign observer might 
have told Bowditch that the sufferings 
which both Bowditch and Douglass were 
enduring betrayed the fact that a social 

21 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

revolution was under way. They were 
the sign of an approaching homogeneity. 
This universal disturbance, this universal 
throe is the first thing that all the people 
of the United States ever experienced to- 
gether. Their former unions had been 
political and external : this was spiritual and 
internal. 

We are familiar with the Northern form 
of the uneasiness, because the Northerner 
could speak. He cried out ; and through his 
utterance came the cure. But of the pain of 
the Southerner, to whom all expression of 
feeling was denied, we know nothing. 
With the rise of Abolition, perished every 
vestige of free speech at the South. Events 
now converged to crush the manhood out 
of the slave-holding classes. A Southerner 
could not be gentle, unselfish, quick to speak 
his thought, or genuinely interested in any- 
thing. His opinions were prepared for him 
before he was born; and they were light- 
killing illusions, — the precursors of mania. 
The enactment of very stringent and in- 
human slave codes, and the prohibition of all 
education to the slaves followed in the wake 
of the Abolition outbreaks. The maturing 
of a sort of philosophy of slavery, accord- 
ing to which slavery was seen as the cor- 

22 



THE BACK-GROUND 

nerstone of religion and progress, was the 
work of the following decade, and the task 
of Calhoun. The corollaries to this philos- 
ophy which involved an abandonment of 
popular education, and the cutting off of the 
South from every intellectual contact with 
the civilization of Europe, were duly worked 
out during the next thirty years. By the 
time the war came there existed a sort of 
Religion of Slavedom. The Pro-slavery 
Northern Democrats of Buchanan's time 
held opinions which would have shocked the 
most pronounced slaveholders of 1820. 

During all this time Virginia and the 
Carolinas, — which constituted the Holyland 
of the Slave Dispensation, — endured a si- 
lent exodus and migration on the part of the 
more liberal spirits. Men even went to 
New Orleans to escape the tyranny of slave 
opinion at Charleston. Thus were the souls 
of Americans squeezed and their tempers 
made acid. A slightly too ready responsive- 
ness to stimulus of any kind came to be the 
mark of the American, whether at the North 
or at the South; the difference being that 
the too ready response at the South was apt 
to be an insult, at the North an apology. 

This hair trigger nervousness on the part 
of everybody was the result of poison in the 
23 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

system. What could the manly Southern 
youth do ? Leave all and follow Abolition ? 
He knew of Abolition only that it was a vil- 
lainous attack on his father's character and 
property. He was in the grip of a relent- 
less, moving hurricane of distorted views, 
false feelings, erroneous philosophy; and he 
knew nothing clearly, understood nothing 
clearly, until he perished upon the battle- 
fields of the Civil War, fighting like a hero. 
It is impossible in describing the course of 
the Slave Power between 1832-65 to avoid 
harsh language. If ever wickedness came 
upward in the counsels of men, it did so 
here. Yet there are elements in all these 
matters which elude our analysis. The vir- 
tues glimmer and seem to go out; but they 
are never really extinguished. How much 
idealism, how much latent heroism must 
have existed in the South during all these 
years before the war, was seen when the war 
came. Villains do not choose for them- 
selves Commanders like Robert E. Lee and 
Stonewall Jackson. It is lost, that old so- 
ciety, and it died almost speechless, — died 
justly and inevitably. Yet we do well to 
remember with what a flame of sacrifice 
it perished, to remember with what force, 
what devotion, what heroism. Humanity 
24 



THE BACK-GROUND 

showed herself to be still adorned in that 
hour of an all-devouring atonement. 

The great fever came to an end with 
Appomattox. The delirium stopped: the 
plague had been expelled. The nation was 
not dead : the nation was at the beginning of 
a long convalescence. It is, however, about 
the earlier symptoms of the disorder that I 
would speak here, about the presentiments 
of headache and nausea, and about that 
dreadfullest moment in all sickness (as it 
seems to me), the moment when we admit 
that something serious is coming on. 

The struggle between the North and the 
South began over free speech about the 
negro, and especially about the right of 
benevolent people at the North to extend 
their benevolence to the negro, as, for in- 
stance, in their schools, Sunday-schools, hos- 
pitals, etc. Now the South sincerely be- 
lieved that the Missouri Compromise of 
1820 had morally bound the North not to 
talk about slavery in private conversation, 
and not to treat the negro as a human being. 
The South had succeeded in imposing this 
conviction upon the whole North. 

" The patriotism of all classes," wrote Ed- 
ward Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, 
in a message to his Legislature, " the patri- 

25 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

otism of all classes must be invoked to ab- 
stain from discussion, which by exasperat- 
ing the master, can have no other effect than 
to render more oppressive the condition of 
the slave/' 

This paralysis of dumbness and of fear 
touched everyone. It was not exactly fear, 
either, but a sort of subtle freemasonry, 
a secret belief that nothing must be dis- 
turbed. The Southerners lived in sincere 
terror of slave uprisings — and they man- 
aged to convey a mysterious tremor to the 
North upon the subject. 

Dr. Channing was that age's figure-head. 
He was the most eminent man in the coun- 
try; the moral sciences w^re his province. 
He was, therefore, constantly appealed to 
by all persons and parties upon the slavery 
question. His responses and his conduct 
upon such occasions give the best key to that 
age which we have ; and his character will be 
discussed as long as posterity takes an in- 
terest in the epoch. This must be my ex- 
cuse for recurring to Dr. Channing from 
time to time and for using him, at this 
point, to illustrate the flatness and tameness 
of good men in that age ; yes, to illustrate the 
spiritual domination of evil at the time when 
Garrison began his crusade. The drawing- 
a6 



THE BACK-GROUND 

rooms of our grandfathers* times contained 
automata; ghosts clustered about the din- 
ner tables. The people had forgotten what 
the sound of a man's voice was like. That 
is why they were so startled by Garrison. 

Even Channing, who was a true saint, 
and when time was given him, a cour- 
ageous man, is an injured being — like a 
beautiful plant which has grown to ma- 
turity in a dungeon. Under the pres- 
sure of his own conscience and of certain 
hammering Abolitionists who were his 
friends, he wrote an analysis of slavery, 
and stood shoulder to shoulder with the 
Abolitionists on the question of free speech. 
It is to his everlasting honor that he did this : 
for he sincerely deplored the methods of the 
Abolitionists and was incapable of under- 
standing their mission. By his writings on 
slavery and by his act in standing by the 
Abolitionists on the question of free speech, 
Channing became a broken idol to all of the 
South and to half of his Boston admirers. 
We must never confound him, as the Abo- 
litionists were prone to do, with the contem- 
porary flock of time-serving parsons. 
Channing was a man who could, and did, go 
through the fire for principle. But he was 
a man lacking in instinct, a sad man, too 
27 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

reasonable to understand this crisis or know- 
how to meet it. He was trampled upon by 
his congregation, and knew not how to save 
himself. 

Dr. Channing's coldness toward Abolition 
might be shown by his words to Daniel 
Webster in 1828, deprecating any agitation 
of the slavery question ; by his studied avoid- 
ance of Garrison in social life; by his inabil- 
ity, even in the Essay on Slavery, to see the 
importance of the Abolition movement ; — or 
in a hundred other ways. On the other 
hand. Dr. Channing's services to the Anti- 
slavery cause could be illustrated by this 
same essay, and by the esteem and love 
which many leading Anti-slavery people al- 
ways bore him. Let us, however, go to the 
bottom of the whole matter. 

On January 13th, 1840, Dr. Charles Pol- 
len, a German enthusiast and one of the few 
highly educated men among the Abolition- 
ists, was burned alive in the ill-fated steamer 
Lexington, while on a journey from New 
York to Boston. Follen was a young doc- 
tor of laws and a teacher at the University 
of Jena, who had been prosecuted for his 
liberal opinions by the reactionary govern- 
ments of Prussia and Austria in 1824. He 
had fled to Switzerland and thence to the 
28 



THE BACK-GROUND 

United States. His friends in this country 
secured him a post as lecturer, and after- 
wards as professor, at Harvard College; 
which post he lost through expressing his 
opinions on slavery. He afterwards took a 
pastorate in the Unitarian Church and lost 
it through the same cause. 

Follen was what Goethe used to call a 
" Schoene Seele," — beloved of all. He 
was an especial friend of Channing's. His 
tragic death was at the time considered by 
the Abolitionists as the severest blow which 
they had yet received. They sought a place 
to hold a commemorative meeting in his 
honor, and they applied to Channing for 
permission to use his church; which Chan- 
ning accorded. The standing committee of 
the church, however, cancelled this permis- 
sion. Channing's biographer speaks as fol- 
lows: 

** Nothing in all his (Channing's) in- 
tercourse with his people, nothing in his 
whole Anti-slavery experience, caused him so 
much pain as a refusal of the use of the 
church to the Massachusetts Anti-slavery 
Society, on the sad occasion when all true- 
hearted persons were called to mourn the 
awful death of Charles Follen, and when 
the Rev. S. J. May had prepared a discourse 
29 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

in commemoration of the rare virtues of 
that heroic and honored man. It was not 
only the insult to the memory of a beloved 
friend that grieved him, — though this could 
not but shock his quick and delicate feel- 
ings; still less was it the disregard, under 
such touching circumstances, of his well- 
known wishes, that wounded him most 
deeply; but this manifestation of a want of 
high sentiment in the congregation to which, 
for so many years, he had officiated as pas- 
tor, made him question the usefulness of his 
whole ministry. To what end had he 
poured out his soul, if such conduct was a 
practical embodiment of the principles and 
precepts which he had so earnestly incul- 
cated? This event brought home to his 
heart the conviction that the need was very 
urgent of a thorough application of the 
Christian law of love to all existing social 
relations." 

It is evident to the common mind that 
Channing should have resigned his post 
rather than accept this affront from his flock. 
Nay, Channing should have resigned twenty 
years earlier, and upon the first occasion 
when any such subjection of his own im- 
pulses was required of him. The anecdote 
shows the skeleton that lurked in all the 
30 



THE BACK-GROUND 

vestry rooms of that period. It shows also 
how partial are the philosophic illuminations 
of men. Dr. Channing disbelieved in the 
principle of association. It was one of the 
points in his disapproval of the Anti-slavery 
people that they worked through associa- 
tions; for he had a philosophic disbelief in 
the theory of association. I share this dis- 
belief wnth Dr. Channing; the miserable 
squabbles between Anti-slavery associations 
in which the reformers wasted their force 
and impaired their tempers,, show very 
clearly the dangers inherent in association, 
which dangers Channing very clearly saw. 
Yet Channing was himself the servant of an 
association; and every fault in his relation 
to the great moral question of his time may 
be traced to that fact. 

Association, — business or social, literary 
or artistic, religious or scientific, — all as- 
sociation is opposed to any disrupting idea. 
The merchants and lawyers of Boston fled 
Abolition as a plague ; they regarded Aboli- 
tion as an enemy to be fought with all weap- 
ons. Garrison was once taken to hear Dr. 
Channing by an acquaintance of both parties, 
and he sat in a pew which belonged to a con- 
servative family, but which that family had 
been in the habit of throwing open to others. 
31 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

On the Tuesday following this apparition of 
Garrison in the sacred pew, the future use 
of it was withdrawn by a stiff note from the 
conservative family. The reason for this 
excess of caution was that the South disci- 
plined Northern merchants by a withdrawal 
of business; and the South kept its eyes 
open. A rumor that Garrison had been seen 
in a particular pew might make the pew- 
owner a marked man for commercial punish- 
ment. " Mr. May," said a New York mer- 
chant of the first rank to the reformer, whom 
he summoned to an interview during the 
progress of an Anti-slavery meeting, " Mr. 
May, we are not such fools as not to know 
that slavery is a great evil; a great wrong. 
But it was consented to by the founders of 
our Republic. It was pro voided for in the 
Constitution of our Union. A great portion 
of the property of the Southerners is in- 
vested under its sanction; and the business 
of the North, as well as the South, has be- 
come adjusted to it. There are millions 
upon millions of dollars due from South- 
erners to the merchants and mechanics of 
this city alone, the payment of which would 
be jeopardized by any rupture between the 
North and the South. We cannot afford, 
sir, to let you and your associates succeed 
3^ 



THE BACK-GROUND 

in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It 
is not a matter of principle with us. It is 
a matter of business necessity. We cannot 
afford to let you succeed. And I have called 
you out to let you know, and to let your fel- 
low-laborers know, that we do not mean to 
allow you to succeed. We mean, sir," said 
he, with increased emphasis, — "we mean, 
sir, to put you Abolitionists down, — by fair 
means if we can, by foul means if we must." 
Truly the world was not very different 
then from what it is to-day. If a man takes 
a stand against any business interest, how- 
ever iniquitous, that interest will strike at 
him on the following day. 



33 



Ill 

THE FIGURE 

The essential quality of all this old society 
was that it was cold. In the last analysis, — 
after the historical and constitutional ques- 
tions have been patiently analyzed, after eco- 
nomics and sociology have had their say, — 
the trouble with the American of 1830 was 
that he had a cold heart. Cruelty, lust, busi- 
ness interest, remoteness from European in- 
fluence had led to the establishment of an un- 
feeling civilization. The essential quality 
of Garrison is that he is hot. This must be 
borne in mind at every moment as the chief 
and real quality of Garrison. Disregard the 
arguments; sink every intellectual concep- 
tion, every bit of logic and of analysis, and 
look upon the age; — you see a cold age. 
Look upon Garrison : — you see a hot coal of 
fire. He plunges through the icy at- 
mosphere like a burning meteorite from an- 
other planet. 

There is a second contrast. The age was 
conciliatory: Garrison is aggressive. These 
34 



THE FIGURE 

two forms of the contrast between Garrison 
and his age lie close together and merge 
into each other: yet they are not entirely 
identical : the first concerns the emotions, the 
second, the intellect. Conciliation was the 
sin of that age. Now this anti-type, this 
personified enemy of his age, — Garrison, — 
must in his nature be self-reliant, self-assert- 
ive, self-sufficient. He relates himself to 
no precedent. He strikes out from his inner 
thought. He is even swords-drawn with 
his own thought of yesterday. When he 
changes his mind he asks God to forgive him 
for ever having thought otherwise. His in- 
stinct is so thoroughly opposed to any au- 
thority except the inner light of conscience, 
that he makes that conscience, — his local, 
momentary conscience, — into a column of 
smoke sent by the Lord. Xot Bunyan, not 
Luther is greater than Garrison on this side 
of his nature. He is not an intellectual per- 
son. He is not a highly educated man. 
But he is a Will of the first magnitude, a will 
made perfect, because almost entirely uncon- 
scious, almost entirely dedicated and sub- 
dued to its mission. 

I quote here the whole of the first editorial 
of The Liberator (January ist, 1831), be- 
cause the whole of Garrison is in it. In 
35 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

reading it let us remember the shattering, 
repulsive power which self-assertion exer- 
cises over smooth, cold people of good taste, 
whose worldly fortunes and sincere spiritual 
beliefs are bound up for all eternity with 
smoothness, coldness, and good taste. The 
punctuation and typesetting of the article, 
and the verses (not his own) at the end of 
it, may also be noted as indicating Garrison's 
taste and education: 

" In the month of August, I issued pro- 
posals for publishing The Liberator in 
Washington City ; but the enterprise, though 
hailed in different sections of the country, 
was palsied by public indifference. Since 
that time, the removal of the Genius of Uni- 
versal Emancipation to the Seat of Govern- 
ment has rendered less imperious the estab- 
lishment of a similar periodical in that quar- 
ter. 

" During my recent tour for the purpose 
of exciting the minds of the people by a 
series of discourses on the subject of slavery, 
every place that I visited gave fresh evi- 
dence of the fact that a greater revolution 
in public sentiment was to be effected in the 
free States — and particularly in New Eng- 
land — than at the South. I found con- 
tempt more bitter, opposition more active, 
36 



THE FIGURE 

detraction more relentless, prejudice more 
stubborn, and apathy more frozen, than 
among slave-owners themselves. Of 
course, there were individual exceptions to 
the contrary. This state of things afflicted, 
but did not dishearten me. I determined at 
every hazard to lift up the standard of eman- 
cipation in the eyes of the nation, within 
sight of Blinker Hill and in the birthplace of 
liberty. That standard is now unfurled; 
and long may it float, unhurt by the spolia- 
tions of time or the missiles of a desperate 
foe — yea, till every chain be broken, and 
every bondman set free ! Let Southern op- 
pressors tremble — let their secret abettors 
tremble — let, their Northern apologists 
tremble — let all the enemies of the perse- 
cuted blacks tremble. 

" I deem the publication of my original 
Prospectus unnecessary, as it has obtained 
a wide circulation. The principles therein 
inculcated will be steadily pursued in this 
paper, excepting that I shall not array myself 
as the political partisan of any man. In de- 
fending the great cause of human rights, I 
wish to derive the assistance of all religions 
and of all parties." 

Thus began Garrison in his first editorial 
in the Liberator, Does this seem egotism, 
27 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

this almost pompous deliberation, this taking 
off his coat and laying it across a chair as he 
makes his bow to the public? Yes, it is 
egotism. It is gigantic egotism, — but not 
the egotism of vanity or self-seeking. It is 
the selfless egotism of a supreme self-asser- 
tion, put forth unconsciously by human na- 
ture; and as such it is in itself a sample of 
what that age needed, the sample of a spirit 
of independence without which slavery 
never could and never would have been 
abolished. Let us proceed with the edi- 
torial. ..." Assenting to the * self- 
evident truth ' maintained in the American 
Declaration of Independence, * that all men 
are created equal, and endowed by their 
Creator with certain inalienable rights — 
among which are life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness,' I shall strenuously con- 
tend for the immediate enfranchisement of 
our slave population. In Park Street 
Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an 
address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented 
to the popular but pernicious doctrine of 
gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity 
to make a full and unequivocal recantation, 
and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, 
of my country, and of my brethren, the poor 
slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full 
38 



THE FIGURE 

of timidity, injustice, and absurdity. A 
similar recantation, from my pen, was pub- 
lished in the Genius of Universal Emancipa- 
tion at Baltimore, in September, 1829. My 
conscience is now satisfied. 

" I am aware that many object to the se- 
verity of my language ; but is there not cause 
for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, 
and as uncompromising as justice. On this 
subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or 
write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a 
man whose house is on fire to give a moder- 
ate alarm ; tell him to moderately rescue his 
wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the 
mother to gradually extricate her babe from 
the fire into which it has fallen ; — but urge 
me not to use moderation in a cause like the 
present. I am in earnest — I will not 
equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not 
retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE 
HEARD. The apathy of the people is 
enough to make every statue leap from its 
pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of 
the dead. 

" It is pretended that I am retarding the 
cause of emancipation by the coarseness of 
my invective and the precipitancy of my 
measures. The charge is not true. On this 
question my influence, — humble as it is, — 
39 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

is felt at this moment to a considerable ex- 
tent, and shall be felt in coming years — 
not perniciously, but beneficially — not as a 
curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will 
bear testimony that I was right. I desire to 
thank God that He enables me to disre- 
gard ' the fear of man which bringeth a 
snare,' and to speak his truth in its simplic- 
ity and power. . . . 

. . . " And here I close with this 
fresh dedication: 

*' Oppression ! I have seen thee, face to face, 
And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow ; 
But thy soul-withering glance I fear not 

now — 
For dread to prouder feelings doth give 

place 
Of deep abhorrence ! Scouring the disgrace 
Of slavish knees that at thy footstool bow, 
I also kneel — but with far other vow 
Do hail thee and thy herd of hirelings 

base : — 
I swear, while life-blood warms my throb- 
bing veins. 
Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and 

hand, 
Thy brutalizing sway — till Afric's chains 
Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued 
land, — 

40 



THE FIGURE 

Trampling Oppression and his iron rod : 
Such is the vow I take — SO HELP ME 
GOD!" 

Garrison's early history is the familiar 
tale of poverty, and reminds one of Benja- 
min Franklin's boyhood. His mother, a 
person of education and refinement, was, 
during Garrison's babyhood, plunged into 
bitter destitution. He was born in New- 
buryport, Massachusetts, in 1805. At the 
age of nine, in order to help pay for his 
board, he was working for Deacon Bartlett 
in Newburyport. Later, he learned shoe- 
making at Lynn, cabinet-making at Haver- 
hill, and in 18 18, at the age of thirteen, was 
apprenticed to a printer and newspaper pub- 
lisher. Now began his true education. He 
read Scott, Byron, Moore, Pope, and Camp- 
bell ; and at the age of seventeen, was writ- 
ing newspaper articles in the style of the 
day. By the time he was twenty. Garrison 
was a thoroughgoing printer and journalist; 
and during the last three years of his ap- 
prenticeship he had entire charge of his mas- 
ter's paper. During the next four years, he 
edited four newspapers, and embraced va- 
rious reforms besides Anti-slavery, e. g., 
Temperance, Education, Peace, Sabbatarian- 
ism, etc. He seems at this period to b.e 
41 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

like a hound on a scent, as he takes up 
and abandons one newspaper after another. 
He is already a reformer, already a boiling 
enthusiast, already an insuppressible Vol- 
ubility, already one-ideaed upon any sub- 
ject that he treats. If his theme be 
Temperance, then moderate drinking is 
the worst enemy of man. He joins most 
heartily in the anathema against to- 
bacco either in chewing, smoking, or snuff- 
ing. He is against capital punishment and 
imprisonment for debt, and it is safe to say 
that he would, at a moment's notice, have 
delivered a violent judgment upon any sub- 
ject that aroused his compassion. 

Whatever else he was, he was a full grown 
being at the age of twenty-four, when Ben- 
jamin Lundy persuaded him to devote his 
life to the cause of the slave. Benjamin 
Lundy, the quiet Quaker, had been editing 
the Genius of Universal Emancipation since 
1821, and was at this time (1828) estab- 
lished in Baltimore, where he had recently 
been assaulted and almost killed in the 
streets by Austin Wool folk, a slave trader. 
Lundy's practice was to walk from town to 
town throughout the country, founding Anti- 
slavery societies, and introducing his news- 
paper. He first met Garrison while he was 
42 



THE FIGURE 

on a visit to Boston, and at a later date he 
walked from Baltimore to Bennington, Ver- 
mont, where Garrison was editing a journal, 
in order to convert Garrison. He suc- 
ceeded. Garrison left Vermont and became 
co-editor of the Genius in Baltimore. Be- 
fore he migrated to Baltimore, however, he 
visited Boston and there on July 4th, 1829, 
he delivered an address in the Park Street 
Church which is really the beginning of his 
mission. The Reverend John Pierpont 
(the grandfather of Pierpont Morgan) 
was present and wrote a hymn for the oc- 
casion. Whittier, a stripling, was also pres- 
ent. The tone and substance of this ad- 
dress are strikingly like those of Emerson's 
Phi Beta Kappa address (delivered six years 
later), in which Emerson made his manly 
salutatory to his age. Garrison's words are 
as follows: — 

'' I speak not as a partisan or an opponent 
of any man or measures, when I say that 
our politics are rotten to the core. We 
boast of our freedom, who go shackled to 
the polls, year after year, by tens, and hun- 
dreds, and thousands! We talk of free 
agency, who are the veriest machines — the 
merest automata — in the hands of unprin- 
cipled jugglers ! We prate of integrity, and 
43 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

virtue, and independence, who sell our birth- 
right for office, and who, nine times in ten, 
do not get Esau's bargain — no, not even a 
mess of pottage ! Is it republicanism to say 
that the majority can do no wrong? Then 
I am not a republican. Is it aristocracy to 
say that the people sometimes shamefully 
abuse their high trust ? Then I am an aris- 
tocrat. . . . 

" Before God, I must say, that such a glar- 
ing contradiction as exists between our creed 
and practice, the annals of six thousand 
years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am 
ashamed of my country. I am sick of our 
unmeaning declamation in praise of lib- 
erty and equality; of our hypocritical cant 
about the unalienable rights of man. I 
could not, for my right hand, stand up be- 
fore a European assembly, and exult that I 
am an American citizen, and denounce the 
usurpations of a kingly government as 
wicked and unjust; or, should I make the 
attempt, the recollection of my country's 
barbarity and despotism would blister my 
lips, and cover my cheeks with burning 
blushes of shame." 

Let us now take a few sentences from 
Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address : 

" The spirit of the American freeman is 

44 



THE FIGURE 

already suspected to be timid, imitative, 
tame. Public and private avarice make the 
air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar 
is decent, indolent, complaisant. See al- 
ready the tragic consequence. The mind of 
this country, taught to aim at low objects, 
eats upon itself. . . . Young men of 
the fairest promise, who begin life upon 
our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, 
shined upon by all the stars of God, find 
the earth below not in unison with these, 
but are hindered from action by the dis- 
gust which the principles on which busi- 
ness is managed inspire, and turn drudges, 
or die of disgust, some of them suicides. 
What is the remedy? They did not yet 
see, and thousands. of young men as hope- 
ful now crow^ding to the barriers for the 
career do not yet see, that if the single 
man plant himself indomitably on his 
instincts, and there abide, the huge world 
will come round to him." 

The difference between Emerson and 
Garrison is that Emerson is interested in aes- 
thetic, Garrison in social matters. The one 
represents the world of intellect, the other, 
the world of feeling. Both speak the same 
idea, each according to his own idiom. 
Both are, in essence, affronting the same 
45 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

evil, — the Dominion of Slavery. The dif- 
ference is that Garrison has seen the evil 
plainly, and has laid his hand upon it; Em- 
erson was to live in ignorance of its specific 
nature for many years to come. I shall 
revert again to the relation between these 
two young men, both so noble, both of 
such immense consequence to the country, 
each of them, in a sense, the father of all 
of us, — whose spirits were raised up by God 
to shed new life upon America. 

We must return to Garrison as the co- 
editor with Lundy of the Genius of Uni- 
versal Emancipation in Baltimore. Inas- 
much as Garrison had already received his 
revelation as to immediate emancipation, 
and Lundy favored slower methods, the 
two partners agreed to sign their articles 
separately. Baltimore was, at that time, the 
most northern port in the coastwise slave 
trade: and Garrison constantly saw the 
slaves being shipped south in New England 
bottoms. It was not long before Garrison 
was thrown into jail in Baltimore as the re- 
sult of a suit for criminal libel, brought by 
a New England slave trader whom he had 
denounced. The Mr. Todd whom he " li- 
beled," and about whom he spoke only the 
truth, was a fellow-townsman of Garrison's, 
46 



THE FIGURE 

being a native of Newburyport, Mass., and 
was thus a natural target for Garrison's in- 
vective. Garrison remained in jail seven 
weeks, during which time he conducted a 
most telling campaign of pamphlets, private 
letters and public cards, sonnets, letters to 
editors, etc., with the result that the whole 
of America heard of the incident. Mr. Ar- 
thur Tappan of New York became inter- 
ested in the case, and secured Garrison's re- 
lease by paying the fine of one hundred 
dollars. This was in the spring of 1830. 

Thus it may be seen that at the time that 
Garrison returned to Boston and established 
his Liberator (1830-31) he was twenty-five 
years old, a consummate controversialist, 
and the apostle of a new theory, — Immedi- 
ate Emancipation, for which he had already 
suffered imprisonment. The world has no 
terrors for a man like this. 

Anti-slavery action did not begin with 
Garrison. There had been Anti-slavery So- 
cieties for fifty years before him; there ex- 
isted in 1830 perhaps a hundred and fifty 
of them, many of them being in the slave 
states. But the new movement did not 
spring from these old societies. It was mili- 
tant as they were not : it was dissatisfied 
with their mild methods and inactivity: in 
47 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

fact, it denounced them. The new move- 
ment came bursting up hke a subterranean 
torrent. 

I have no doubt that Garrison and his 
mission were somehow fundamentally con- 
nected with the labors of the Anti-slavery 
men who kept the name of mercy alive be- 
tween 1776 and 1820. Yet these old agen- 
cies were upheaved from beneath. Aboli- 
tion appeared at the North and over- 
slaughed them; the Slave Power developed 
new heat at the South and burned out the 
roots of them. Any single anecdote of 
those times will be apt to illustrate both 
sides of the question, i. e., the new vulture 
quality of slavery at the South, and the new 
bulldog quality of Abolition at the North. 
For instance, when the Southern statesmen 
recognized the existence of Abolition, they 
began passing laws against the introduction 
of Abolition literature into the South, and 
they began to correspond with Northern 
statesmen and officials with the aim of sup- 
pressing Garrison. The Legislature of 
Georgia, in 1831, offered a reward of 
$5000 for the arrest and conviction of Gar- 
rison under the laws of Georgia. The 
Southern press went into paroxysms of 
clamorous rage. On the other hand, Gar- 
48 



THE FIGURE 

rison is by no means deficient in vigor of 
feeling. The following is his comment on 
the reward: 

" A price set upon the head of a citizen 
of Massachusetts — for what? For dar- 
ing to give his opinions of the moral aspect 
of slavery! Where is the liberty of the 
press and of speech ? Where the spirit of our 
fathers? Where the immunities secured to 
us by our Bill of Rights? Are we the 
slaves of Southern taskmasters? Is it 
treason to maintain the principles of the 
Declaration of Independence? Must we 
say that slavery is a sacred and benevolent 
institution, or be silent? Know this, ye 
senatorial patrons of kidnappers! that we 
despise your threats as much as we deplore 
your infatuation: nay, more — know that 
a hundred men stand ready to fill our place 
as soon as it is made vacant by violence. 
The Liberator shall yet live — live to warn 
you of your danger and guilt — live to 
plead for the perishing slaves — live to hail 
the day of universal emancipation ! " 

Now we can see at a glance that this new 
Abolition is much more than Abolition: it 
is Courage. Garrison's tone here takes us 
back a generation to James Otis, to John 
Adams, and to the other Revolutionary he- 
49 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

roes ; and he is really standing for constitu- 
tional liberty quite as distinctly, and at as 
crucial a moment, as those gentlemen had 
done. Garrison's language is harsh ; but he 
is almost the only out-and-out masculine 
person in the North. No: there was one 
other, — the aged John Quincy Adams ; and 
Adams was as harsh, and as unmeasured, as 
Garrison. Nay, Adams was personally bit- 
ter, which Garrison never was. Adams 
was, in reality, a survivor of 1776, an un- 
tamed aristocrat — and he bore a vase of 
the old fire in his bosom. This was per- 
mitted to Adams, — because no one could 
stop him; but men vaguely imagined that 
Garrison's fire could be put out. 

In 1 83 1, Garrison was indicted in North 
Carolina. The South was not wrong in 
thinking that the official classes at the North 
would lend aid in suppressing the new 
movement. Judge Thatcher of the Munici- 
pal Court in Boston made a charge to the 
Grand Jury (1832) in which he laid the 
foundation for the criminal prosecution of 
Abolitionists. No one could tell just how 
far subserviency might go. The Mayor of 
Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, was nat- 
urally appealed to by the Southern states- 
men to protect them against the circulation 
50 



THE FIGURE 

of Abolition literature. It was in 1829 that 
Otis was first called on to do something 
about " Walker's appeal," a fierce, biblical 
pamphlet, full of power, written by a col- 
ored man in Boston and urging the slaves 
to rise. Otis replied that the author had 
not made himself amenable to the laws of 
Massachusetts, and that the book had caused 
no excitement in Boston. Garrison had 
had nothing to do with AValker's pamphlet, 
and had publicly condemned its doctrines. 
None the less, Walker's appeal was an out- 
crop of the same subterranean fire that 
coursed through Garrison, — and when Nat 
Turner's Slave Rebellion broke out (1831) 
and a dozen white families were murdered 
in Virginia, the whole South was thrown 
into a panic, and attributed the insurrection 
to the teachings of the Abolitionists. 

This puny rebellion was easily put down. 
Turner was hanged, his followers were 
burnt with hot irons, their faces were muti- 
lated, their jaws broken asunder, their ham- 
strings cut, their bodies stuck like hogs, their 
heads spiked to the whipping-post. No con- 
nection was ever discovered between Nat 
Turner's Rebellion and the Abolitionists, 
who never at any time sent their papers to 
slaves. The illiteracy of the blacks made it 
SI 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

improbable that they had been influenced by 
any sort of writings. And yet one cannot 
help feeling that the existence of a militant 
propaganda in their behalf had reached the 
consciousness of the slaves, and that this 
rising was the outcome of the new age. 
Angels' wings were beating upon the air, 
and charging it with both life and death, 
till even dumb slaves felt the impulsion. 
Various Southern governors, statesmen, 
and newspapers renewed the campaign 
against the Liberator^ and Otis was again 
appealed to. 

" To be more specific in our object," says 
the National Intelligencer which was pub- 
lished in Washington, and was one of the 
most influential journals of the epoch, ** we 
now appeal to the worthy Mayor of the 
City of Boston, whether no law can be 
found to prevent the publication, in the city 
over which he presides, of such diabolical 
papers (copies of the Liberator) as we 
have seen a sample of here in the hands of 
slaves, and of which there are many in cir- 
culation to the south of us. We have no 
doubt whatever of the feelings of Mr. Otis 
on this subject, or those of his respectable 
constituents. We know they would prompt 
him and them to arrest the instigator of 

52 



THE FIGURE 

human butchery in his mad career. We 
know the difficulty which surrounds the 
subject, because the nuisance is not a nui- 
sance, technically speaking, within the lim- 
its of Massachusetts. But, surely, if the 
courts of law have no power, public opin- 
ion has to interfere, until the intelligent 
Legislature of Massachusetts can provide a 
durable remedy for this most appalling 
grievance. . . ." 

Robert Y. Hayne of Columbia, S. C, 
begged Otis to find out whether Garrison 
had mailed him (Hayne) a copy of the 
Liberator. Otis obsequiously sent a deputy 
to question Garrison. This was something 
very like a prostitution of his office on the 
part of Mayor Otis; because what Hayne 
wanted was to obtain evidence to be used 
in a criminal prosecution of Garrison. Gar- 
rison at once becomes the able constitutional 
lawyer. 

'' The Hon. Robert Y. Hayne of Colum- 
bia, S. C," says the Liberator of October 
29th, 1 83 1, " (through the medium of a 
letter), wishes to know of the Mayor of 
Boston, who sent a number of the Liberator 
to him, a few weeks ago. The Mayor of 
Boston (through the medium of a deputy) 
wishes to know of Mr. Garrison whether he 
53 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

sent the aforesaid number to the aforesaid 
individual. Mr. Garrison (through the 
medium of his paper) wishes to know of 
the Hon. Robert Y. Hayne of Cokimbia, 
S. C, and the Mayor of Boston, what 
authority they have to put such questions? " 
We can see in this, as in all the rest of 
Garrison's activity, the tactician of genius. 
We can see also the inner relation between 
morality and constitutional law, which ex- 
ists in all ages. The Reformer is always 
struggling against arbitrary power. He in- 
vokes the protection of some law or cus- 
tom which exists, or ought to exist. In 
cases where this law or custom has a his- 
toric basis, the struggle goes on in the form 
of constitutional law. The picture of the 
Reformer is always the picture of Courage 
and of Mercy: the courageous man who is, 
by his conduct, protecting the weak. It is 
this vision of courage and mercy in opera- 
tion, that melts the heart and inspires new 
courage and mercy in the beholder. Here is 
the great question which stands behind all the 
details ; for courage and mercy are of eternal 
importance. That is why we hear so much 
of Pym, Hampden, etc. Their conduct has 
a direct relation to present conditions. No 
day passes in which every man is not put 
54 



THE FIGURE 

to the test many times over, as to his per- 
sonal relation towards the cowardices and 
cruelties of his own age. 

Major Otis saw nothing important in the 
episode which has given him a Dantesque 
immortality. He had never heard of the 
Liberator. He therefore, procured a copy 
of it. 

"I am told," he said, "that it is sup- 
ported chiefly by the free colored people; 
that the number of subscribers in Balti- 
more and Washington exceeds that of those 
in this city, and that it is gratuitously left 
at one or two of the reading rooms in this 
place. It is edited by an individual who 
formerly lived at Baltimore, where his feel- 
ings have been exasperated by some occur- 
rences consequent to his publications there, 
on topics connected with the condition of 
slaves in this country. . . ." 

At a later period Otis wrote: 

" Some time afterward, it was reported 
to me by the city officers that they had fer- 
reted out the paper and its editor; that his 
office was an obscure hole, his only visible 
auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters 
a very few insignificant persons of all col- 
ors. This information, with the consent of 
the aldermen, I communicated to the above- 
55 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

named governors, with an assurance of my 
belief that the new fanaticism had not made, 
nor was likely to make, proselytes among 
the respectable classes of our people. In 
this, however, I was mistaken." 

History has left us, in this anecdote, a sil- 
houette of Harrison Gray Otis, one of Bos- 
ton's most eminent personages at that time, 
— the representative of the old Puritan 
blood, of the education, wealth, good looks, 
social prominence, and political power of 
Boston's leaders. In how short a time, and 
with how easy a transformation does patriot 
turn tyrant. Here is the nephew of James 
Otis, hand in glove with the iniquity of his 
age. He who was rocked in the cradle of 
liberty, is now the agent of the Inquisition. 
And he is perfectly innocent. He is a mere 
toy and creature of his time. A new issue 
has arisen that neither he nor his generation 
understand, and behold, they have become 
oppressors. 

The Hercules that is to save mankind 
from these monsters is in the meanwhile 
working fourteen hours a day, setting type. 
The Liberator was begun without a dollar 
of capital and without a single subscriber. 
Garrison and his partner, Isaac Knapp, a 
young white man equally poor and equally 
56 



THE FIGURE 

able to bear privation, composed, set, and 
printed the paper themselves. They lived 
chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes 
and a little fruit, obtained from the baker's 
shop opposite and from a petty cake and 
fruit shop in the basement. '* I was often at 
the office of the Liberator/' wrote the Rev. 
James C. White. "I knew of his (Garri- 
son's) self-denials. I knew he slept in the 
office with a table for a bed, a book for a 
pillow, and a self-prepared scanty meal for 
his rations in the office, while he set up his 
articles in the Liberator with his own hand, 
and without previous committal to paper." 
" It was a pretty large room," says Jo- 
siah Copley, who visited it in the winter of 
1832-33, "but there was nothing in it to 
relieve its dreariness but two or three very 
common chairs and a pine desk in the cor- 
ner, at which a pale, delicate, and appar- 
ently over-tasked gentleman was sitting. 
. . . I never was more astonished. All 
my preconceptions were at fault. My ideal 
of the man was that of a stout, rugged, 
dark-visaged desperado — something like 
we picture a pirate. He was a quiet, gen- 
tle, and I might say handsome man — a 
gentleman indeed, in every sense of the 
word." 

57 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

" The dingy walls ; the small windows, 
bespattered with printer's ink; the press 
standing in one corner; the composing- 
stands opposite ; the long editorial and mail- 
ing table, covered with newspapers ; the bed 
of the editor and publisher on the floor — 
all these," says Oliver Johnson, ** make a 
picture never to be forgotten." 



58 



IV 

PICTURES OF THE 
STRUGGLE 

There are pages in the memoirs of Anti- 
slavery that shine with a light which sancti- 
fies this continent, and which will be un- 
diminished a thousand years hence. Nay, 
it will shine more clearly then than now; 
for we are still living in the valley of the 
shadow of death. 

The war followed so quickly upon the 
true awakening of the nation as to the na- 
ture of slavery that those early watchers, 
whose cries had aroused us, were still in 
Coventry; they were still held to be odious, 
although their piercing appeal had put life 
and religion into all. The North died for 
the slave, with condemnation of the Aboli- 
tionist upon its lips. This paradoxical out- 
come was due to the rapidity with which 
events moved during the final crisis. A 
revolution may be studied in its origins, and 
may be comprehended through its results; 
but during the actual cascade that leads from 
the one epoch to the other, scene succeeds 
59 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

scene with such fury that history becomes 
unintelligible. In the years that intervened 
between the Kansas troubles and the out- 
break of the war, so many things happened 
at once that all issues and all feelings were 
telescoped together. There followed the 
picturesque horrors and scenes of war-time; 
there followed the new patriotism, the new 
heroes, the New Legend, — all of it so 
vivid, so drenched in grief, so glorified 
by honor, so informed with the mean- 
ing of a new heaven and a new earth, that 
the immediate past was belittled. The 
Abolitionists thus passed straight from 
the odium of people preaching unpleasant 
truth to the odium of people proclaim- 
ing what everybody knows. They have never 
had a heyday. Their cause triumphed 
but not they themselves. They still re- 
main under a cloud in America, and 
are regarded with some distrust by the 
historian and by the common man. I 
can scarcely find a man who sees in these 
early Abolitionists, as I do, the lamp and 
light of the whole after-coming epoch. 
Perhaps our age is still too near to theirs to 
do it justice; and the mere flight of time 
may bring men to a truer perspective of th6 
/ whole matter. 

60 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

Religious animosities do not die out in 
a moment. Many of us still feel a lambent 
and rising heat course through our veins 
in reading the history of the religious 
wars of three centuries ago. This is be- 
cause those wars have come down in fam- 
ily life, and are thus a part of the 
intimate personal history of men. So of 
this just-buried cause, Abolition. Consider 
how the American of to-day reads the Con- 
stitutional History of the years before the 
war. Nullification, the Texas scheme, the 
Mexican War, the Repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise, the Kansas troubles, — all 
these things and every subsidiary foreign 
or domestic issue in our annals, are interest- 
ing to us because we feel so intimately the 
hot place in each one of them. Part 
of this heat comes from prejudice and ac- 
cident, part of it from the central focus of 
truth; and we cannot always be sure which 
kind it is that burns in us. But there is a 
species of glow that can be trusted. It 
comes to us when we read accounts of hero- 
ism. Tales of noble self-sacrifice never re- 
main mere adjuncts to a creed, or portions 
of a partisan tradition. They contain in 
themselves the whole of salvation. Poster- 
ity will recur to the age of the Anti-slavery 
6i 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

movement in order to find there those little 
digests of human nature which are true to 
all time. Here are the gems in the treas- 
ury of a nation's life ; and it matters not to 
later ages whether the geological strata in 
which they lie embedded be Catholic or 
Protestant, Christian or pagan, political or 
religious. 

Whenever a reform movement is started 
in this world and is making headway, the 
evils which it threatens instinctively strive 
to gain control over it. We see this every 
day in our local citizens' movements, which 
always begin by sincere activity, and 
almost always grow effete through capture 
by the politicians. Our civil service asso- 
ciations tend to become absorbed by the 
political parties, who man them with paid 
officials, and run up the expenses till the 
cure has become a part of the disease. This 
oscillation between reform and absorption 
goes on ceaselessly; and the young prophet 
always finds himself obliged to attack and 
destroy some sham reform association, 
bearing a fine name, before he can get at 
the real evil. Let us note this also; that a 
somnolent and inactive reform association, 
with a fine name, and an aroma of original 
benevolence about it, and perhaps even a 
62 



OPICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

superficially good record, is the very sort of 
association to attract respectable, rich, lazy, 
and conservative people. 

The Colonization Society in 1830 pre- 
sented an extreme case of sham reform. 
It had been started in 1816 in Virginia, with 
the avowed object of transporting free ne- 
groes to Africa. It had been pushed with 
diligence and paraded as the cure for the 
evils of slavery, and its benevolence was as- 
sumed on all hands. Everybody of conse- 
quence belonged to it. Garrison, himself^ 
joined it in good faith. This Colonization 
Society had, by an invisible process, half 
conscious, half unconscious, been trans- 
formed into a serviceable organ and mem- 
ber of the Slave Power. In order to in- 
vestigate the real functions of this society. 
Garrison, in 1831, obtained from its head- 
quarters at Washington, the files of its doc- 
uments and of its newspaper, the African 
Repository. 

" The result of his labors," says Oliver 
Johnson, " was seen in a bulky pamphlet, 
that came from the press in the spring, en- 
titled Thoughts on African Colonization; 
or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doc- 
trines, Principles and Purposes of the 
American Colonization Society; together 
63 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

with the Resolutions, Addresses and Re- 
monstrances of the Free People of Color/ 
As a compilation of facts and authorities it 
was unanswerable and overwhelming. It 
condemned the Colonization Society out of 
its own mouth, and by a weight of evidence 
that was irresistible. There was just 
enough of comment to elucidate the testi- 
mony from official sources and bring it 
within the comprehension of the simplest 
reader. His indictment contained ten aver- 
ments, viz. : I, The American Colonization 
Society is pledged not to oppose the system 
of slavery; 2, It apologizes for slavery and 
slave-holders; 3, It recognizes slaves as 
property; 4, It increases the value of slaves; 

5, It is the enemy of immediate abolition; 

6, It is nourished by fear and selfishness; 

7, It aims at the utter expulsion of the 
blacks; 8, It is the disparager of the free 
blacks ; 9, It denies the possibility of elevat- 
ing the blacks in this country; 10, It de- 
ceives and misleads the Nation. Each of 
these averments was supported by pages of 
citations from the annual reports of the so- 
ciety, from the pages of its official organ, 
the African Repository, and from the 
speeches of its leading champions in all 
parts of the country. It was impossible to 

64 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

set this evidence aside, and equally so to re- 
sist the conclusions drawn therefrom. The 
work could not be, and therefore was not 
answered." 

The book made a tremendous sensation 
and became the arsenal of the Abolitionists in 
this country and of their exponents abroad. 
" It was early in 1852, I think," says Elizur 
Wright, " that Mr. Garrison struck the 
greatest blow of his life — or any man's 
life — by publishing in a thick pamphlet, 
with all the emphasis that a printer knows 
how to give to types, his Thoughts on Col- 
onisation/' The Colonization Society was 
an embodiment of the public consciousness. 
It was prevalent, it was a part of the peo- 
ple's daily life. All the great divines be- 
longed to it, all the academic bigwigs, so- 
cial figure-heads and moneyed men. And 
yet, in fact. Colonization was a sort of ob- 
scene dragon that lay before the Palace of 
Slavery to devour or corrupt all assailants. 
Garrison attacked it like Perseus, with a 
ferocity which to this day is thrilling. His 
eyes, his words, and his sword flash and 
glitter. And he slew it. He cut off its 
supplies, he destroyed its reputation in Eu- 
rope; and he thereby opened the path be- 
tween the Abolition movement and the con- 
65 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

science of America. Nothing he ever did 
was more able. Nothing that Frederick 
the Great, Washington or Napoleon ever 
did in the field of war was more brilliant 
than this political foray of Garrison, then 
at the age of twenty-seven, upon the key- 
position and jugular vein of slavery. 

Among the immediate consequences of 
Garrison's pamphlet on colonization was 
the contest over Lane Seminary at Cin- 
cinnati, a contest which became the storm 
center of Abolition influence for a year, and 
qualified public opinion ever after. I quote 
part of the account given by Oliver John- 
son from his well-known volume on Gar- 
rison and his time, — from which many of 
these illustrations are taken. Johnson was 
a right-hand man of Garrison's and at 
times was editor and co-editor of the Lib- 
erator. He gave up his life to Anti-slavery, 
and is a fair example of the sort of man 
who came into existence, as if by miracle, 
when Garrison stamped his foot in 1830. 

" The founding of Lane Seminary, at the 
gateway of the great West, was a part of 
this plan, to extend the influence of Ortho- 
doxy, and Dr. Beecher,* being generally 

* Rev. Lyman Beecher, father of Henry Ward 
Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
66 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

recognized as the leader of New England 
Revivalism, and the strongest representa- 
tive of the advanced school of Orthodoxy 
at that day, Mr. Tappan thought that he 
of all others v^as the man best fitted to train 
a body of ministers for the new field. The 
Doctor, after considerable delay, and to the 
great grief of his Boston church, accepted 
the appointment. Such was his fame that 
a large class of students, of unusual ma- 
turity of judgment and ripeness of Chris- 
tian experience, was at once attracted to the 
Seminary. In the literary and theological 
departments together, they numbered about 
one hundred and ten. Eleven of these were 
from different slave States; seven were 
sons of slaveholders; one was himself a 
slaveholder, and one had purchased his free- 
dom from cruel bondage by the payment of 
a large sum of money, which he had earned 
by extra labor. Besides these there were 
ten others who had resided for longer or 
shorter periods in the slave States, and 
made careful observation of the character 
and workings of slavery. The youngest 
of these students was nineteen years of age ; 
most of those in the theological department 
were more than twenty-six, and several 
were over thirty. Most if not all of them 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

had been converted in the revivals of that 
period, and were filled with the revival spirit 
in which Dr. Beecher so much delighted. 
A more earnest and devoted band of stu- 
dents was probably never gathered in any 
theological seminary. The Doctor had 
great pride as well as confidence in them." 

The students in this Seminary at Cincin- 
nati were planning to form a Colonization 
Society, and Garrison's pamphlet being in the 
air, its arguments were being used to op- 
pose the plan. The students therefore 
organized a nine days' solemn debate 
upon the whole matter, with the result 
that Garrison and Immediate Emanci- 
pation carried the day. In the meantime 
the country at large took an interest in the 
affair, and the press assailed the Seminary 
as a hotbed of Abolition. Dr. Lyman 
Beecher and the trustees were harried and 
threatened. The hearts of the Abolition- 
ists were stirred to the depths. 

" In every part of the free States," says 
Oliver Johnson, '' there were Christian men 
and godly women not a few, who prayed to 
God night and day that Lyman Beecher 
might be imbued with strength and courage 
to stand up nobly in the face of the storm 
that raged around him, and maintain the 
68 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

right of his pupils, as candidates for the 
Christian ministry, to investigate and dis- 
cuss the subject of slavery, and to bear their 
testimony against it as a sin, and a mighty 
hindrance to the spread of the Gospel/' 

At last, the trustees of the Seminary, 
thinking to avoid the danger, forbade the 
students to discuss slavery at all, — even in 
private. The outcome was that seventy or 
eighty students resigned in a body. The 
institution vjas disgraced and wrecked; it 
never recovered from the experience. The 
greatest result of the episode, however, was 
this, that the young men who resigned be- 
came, by force of circumstances, something 
like public characters. Their first step was 
a public one, — into the arena. They issued 
an appeal to the Christian public, and many 
of them went out into the world as protag- 
onists of Abolition. 

Here was a miraculous draught indeed; 
for, of course, among them were men of 
mark; and Theodore D. Weld, the ring- 
leader, was, as Johnson says, the peer of 
Beecher himself in native ability. Thus 
burst a seed-pod of Abolition. This propa- 
gative influence had been in Garrison's 
pamphlet. That pamphlet evoked, it elicited, 
it agitated. When we come later to review 
69 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Garrison's writings, let us remember what 
these writings accompHshed. Let us re- 
member that, however tedious this pamphlet 
on Colonization may seem to us, however 
dead it may fall, under criticism, to-day, it 
had this life-giving quality in its own time. 
Another of the early picturesque episodes 
of Anti-slavery history was the case of Pru- 
dence Crandall. It set the world ringing, 
and caused new champions to step forward, 
fully armed, out of that mystical wood 
which ever fringes the open lawns where 
heroes are at combat. 

I again quote from Oliver Johnson: 
" In 1832, Prudence Crandall, a Quaker 
young woman of high character, established 
in Canterbury, Windham County, Conn., a 
school for young ladies. Now there was 
in that town a respectable colored farmer 
named Harris, who had a daughter, a bright 
girl of seventeen, who, having passed cred- 
itably through one of the district schools, 
desired to qualify herself to be a teacher of 
colored children. She was a girl of pleas- 
ing appearance and manners, a member of 
the Congregational church, and of a hue 
not darker than that of some persons who 
pass for white. Miss Crandall, good 
Quaker that she was, admitted this girl to 
70 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

her school. The pupils, some of whom had 
been associated with her in the district 
school, made no objection; but some of the 
parents were offended, and demanded the 
removal of the dark-skinned pupil. Miss 
Crandall made a strong appeal in behalf 
of the girl, and did her best to overcome the 
prejudices of the objectors, but in vain. 
After reflection she came to the conclusion, 
from a sense of duty, to open her school to 
other girls of a dark complexion. The an- 
nouncement of her purpose threw the whole 
town into a ferment. A town-meeting was 
held in the Congregational church, and so 
fierce was the excitement that the Rev. 
Samuel J. May and Mr. Arnold Buffum, 
the Quaker President of the New England 
Anti-Slavery Society, who had been deputed 
by Miss Crandall to speak for her, w^ere 
denied a hearing." 

Why has this woman no tablet? Will 
the annals of Canterbury, Connecticut, show 
a more heroic figure during the next thou- 
sand years, — that the hamlet waits to cele- 
brate its patron saint? Had Prduence 
Crandall lived in the time of Diocletian, or 
in the time of Savonarola, or in the time 
of Garibaldi, she would have had a shrine 
to which Americans would have flocked to- 
71 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

day. Not without immense influence was 
the stand she made. It cost two years of 
struggle, during which the Slave Power, as 
we have seen, passed such bills to suppress 
her as, in the rebound, weakened its hold 
on the people of the North. We now find it 
hard to imagine that, in 1834, it should 
have been a crime in Connecticut to give 
primary education to colored girls. Yet 
such was the case. Prudence Crandall was 
indicted. 

At her first trial there was a disagreement 
of the jury. Upon the second she was con- 
victed. An appeal was thereupon taken 
and was followed by a disagreement among 
the judges. Thereafter the matter was al- 
lowed to drop, through the finding of a 
flaw in the indictment. All this, however, 
was not done in a corner, nor without the 
indignation of all warm-hearted people, nor 
without the exhibition of splendid legal 
ability on both sides of the contest. Im- 
portant law-suits were the bull-fights of 
America before the war. This one called 
into being a new local newspaper, supported 
by Arthur Tappan, because the existing pa- 
pers would publish only the Pro-slavery side 
of the contest. It called into activity also 
several new propagandists of the first order, 

^2 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

including C. C. Burleigh, who was turned 
from the career of a brilliant advocate and 
was transformed for life into an evangelist 
of liberty, through the courage of this 
woman. Her story showed the lengths to 
which the Slave Power not only would but 
cotdd go at the North, and gave a glance 
into the burning pit, which even casual and 
callous persons could not forget. 

It was while this long contest was in 
progress that the National Anti-slavery So- 
ciety was formed by a meeting at Phila- 
delphia of about sixty Abolitionists, from 
eleven states. How young these men were 
may be judged by the fact that forty-five 
of them survived to witness the emancipa- 
tion of the slaves thirty years later. I 
quote a few paragraphs from Samuel J. 
May's reminiscences, which picture the state 
of mind of these men as their deliberations 
of several days drew to a close. The men 
had, for the most part, never seen each 
other before this meeting. A declaration 
of principles had been prepared. 

" Between twelve and one o'clock," says 
Mr. May, " we repaired with the Declara- 
tion to the hall. Edwin P. Atlee, the chair- 
man, read it to the Convention. Never in 
my life have I seen a deeper impression 
73 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

made by words than was made by that ad- 
mirable document upon all who were there 
present. . . . 

" At the suggestion of an Orthodox 
brother, and without a vote of the Conven- 
tion, our President himself, then an Ortho- 
dox minister, readily condescended to the 
scruples of our Quaker brethren, so far as 
not to call upon any individual to offer 
prayer; but at the opening of our sessions 
each day he gave notice that a portion of 
time would be spent in prayer. Any one 
prayed aloud who was moved to do so. It 
was at the suggestion also of an Orthodox 
member that we agreed to dispense with all 
titles, civil or ecclesiastical. Accordingly, 
you will not find in the published minutes of 
the Convention appendages to any names, — 
neither D. D., nor Rev., nor Hon., nor Esq., 
— no, not even plain Mr. We met as fel- 
low-men, in the cause of suffering fellow- 
men. . . . 

" I cannot describe the holy enthusiasm 
which lighted up every face as we gathered 
around the table on which the Declaration 
lay, to put our names to that sacred instru- 
ment. It seemed to me that every man's 
heart was in his hand, — as if every one 
felt that he was about to offer himself a 
74 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

living sacrifice in the cause of freedom, and 
to do it cheerfully. There are moments 
when heart touches heart, and souls flow 
into one another. That was such a moment. 
I was in them and they in me; we were all 
one. There was no need that each should 
tell the other how he felt and what he 
thought, for we were in each other's bos- 
oms. I am sure there was not, in all our 
hearts, the thought of ever making violent, 
much less mortal, defense of the liberty of 
speech, or the freedom of the press, or of 
our own persons, though we foresaw that 
they all would be grievously outraged. 
Our President, Beriah Green, in his ad- 
mirable closing speech, gave utterance to 
what we all felt and intended should be our 
course of conduct. He distinctly foretold 
the obloquy, the despiteful treatment, the 
bitter persecution, perhaps even the cruel 
deaths we were going to encounter in the 
prosecution of the undertaking to which we 
had bound ourselves." 

The age played its part quite handsomely 
in apportioning persecution to the new 
preachers of the Gospel. The case of Amos 
Dresser may be cited as a sample from 
Oliver Johnson: 

" Amos Dresser, a young theological stu- 
75 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

dent (a native of Berkshire County, Mass.), 
went to Nashville, Tenn., in the summer of 
1835, to sell the 'Cottage Bible/ His 
crime was that he was a member of an anti- 
slavery society, and that he had some anti- 
slavery tracts in his trunk. For this he 
was -flogged in the public square of the city, 
under the direction of a Vigilance Commit- 
tee, composed of the most distinguished cit- 
izens, some of them prominent members of 
churches. He received twenty lashes on 
the bare back from a cowskin. On the 
previous Sunday he had received the bread 
and wine of the communion from the hands 
of one of the members of that Vigilance 
Committee! Another member of the Com- 
mittee was a prominent Methodist, whose 
house was the resort of the preachers and 
bishops of his denomination." 

Now Dresser was a Massachusetts man. 
One wonders how the slaveholders would 
have behaved if a Southerner had, for any 
cause whatever, been treated in Massachu- 
setts as Dresser was treated in Tennessee. 
But the North made no complaints. It is 
incredible — and this is the difficulty which 
the whole epoch presents to us, — it is in- 
credible that the earth should ever have nur- 
tured such a race of cowards as the dom- 
76 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

inant classes in our Northern States seem 
to have been. And yet we know they were; 
no worse, nor very different from other 
persons recorded in history; they furnish 
merely an acute, recent example of how 
self-interest can corrupt character, of how 
tyranny, can delude intellect. The suffer- 
ings of such persons as Dresser are never 
lost. It required just such exhibitions as 
this to make the North see to what depths 
it had sunk. For many years, however, the 
North could draw no inference from such 
cases, except this : — that persons like 
Dresser were misguided fools, who inter- 
fered with matters best left alone. 

The next picture must be ©f another kind. 
It shall be of the young Puritan divine^ 
Samuel J. May, a descendant of the Sewalls 
and Quincys and of all that Eighteenth Cen- 
tury New England aristocracy of learning 
and virtue, which seems to have dwindled 
and withered in a single generation, 
and left, — except for one or two bright 
spirits, — nothing but shadow-characters, 
and feeble-natured persons on the stage. 
The occasion of May's conversion was 
Garrison's first Boston address, which 
was given in 1830 in Julien Hall, the hall 
being lent for the purpose by an associa- 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

tion of avowed infidels. Garrison had but 
recently denounced the principles of these 
men ; for at this time he was intensely ortho- 
dox. The lesson in charity he thus re- 
ceived from opponents must have been 
salutary, even to him. The whole inci- 
dent, including May's conversion, shows 
how closely knitted together are all the lib- 
eral impulses in a community. At this 
time May was thirty-three. His family be- 
sought him to shun the new fanaticism ; but 
he put their counsels gently aside. May is 
the angel of Anti-slavery. He gives the 
following account of his conversion: 

" Presently the young man (Garrison) 
arose, modestly, but with an air of calm 
determination, and delivered such a lec- 
ture as he only, I believe, at that time, could 
have written; for he only had had his eyes 
so anointed that he could see that outrages 
perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs 
done to our common humanity; he only, I 
believe, had had his ears so completely un- 
stopped of * prejudice against color ' that 
the cries of enslaved black men and black 
women sounded to him as if they came from 
brothers and sisters. 

" He began with expressing deep regret 
and shame for the zeal he had lately mani- 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

fested in the Colonization cause. It was, 
he confessed, a zeal without knowledge. 
He had been deceived by the misrepresenta- 
tions so diligently given, throughout the 
free States by Southern agents, of the de- 
sign and tendency of the Colonization 
scheme. During his few months' residence 
in Maryland he had been completely unde- 
ceived. He had there found out that the 
design of those who originated, and the es- 
pecial intentions of those in the Southern 
States that engaged in the plan, were to re- 
move from the country, as * a disturbing 
element ' in slaveholding communities, all 
the free colored people, so that the bondmen 
might the more easily be held in subjection. 
He exhibited in graphic sketches and glow- 
ing colors the suffering of the enslaved, and 
denounced the plan of Colonization as de- 
vised and adapted to perpetuate the system, 
and intensify the wrongs of American 
slavery, and therefore utterly undeserving 
of the patronage of lovers of liberty and 
friends of humanity. 

'' Never before was I so affected by the 
speech of man. When he had ceased speak- 
ing I said to those around me : * That is a 
providential man; he is a prophet; he will 
shake our nation to its center, but he will 
79 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

shake slavery out of it. We ought to know 
him, we ought to help him. Come, let us 
go and give him our hands.' Mr. Sewall 
and Mr. Alcott went up with me, and we 
introduced each other. I said to him : * Mr. 
Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse 
all you have said this evening. Much of it 
requires careful consideration. But I am 
prepared to embrace you. I am sure you 
are called to a great work and I mean to 
help you.' " 

With a mind as acute as a lawyer's, and 
a spirit as unselfish as a seraph's. May 
plunged into the cause. It is he who ap- 
peared upon the scene to protect and to repre- 
sent Prudence Crandall at the meeting 
of her townsfolk which it was not safe for 
her to attend. It is he who has left us the 
best short book on the early years of the 
movement, from which book many of these 
illustrations are taken. He was of milder 
speech than Garrison. " O my friend," 
cried May at the close of an expostulation 
with Garrison, " do try to moderate your 
indignation, and keep more cool; why, you 
are all on fire." Garrison stopped, laid his 
hand on May's shoulder with a kind but 
emphatic pressure, and said slowly: 
" Brother May, I have need to be all on Hre, 
80 



'PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

for I have mountains of ice about me to 
melt." " From that time to this," adds 
Mr. May, " I have never said a word to 
Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style. I 
am more than half satisfied that he was 
right then, and we who objected were mis- 
taken." 

May was not so political-minded as Gar- 
rison; he had not Garrison's strategic un- 
derstanding of the fight, nor Garrison's gift 
of becoming the central whirpool of idea and 
of persecution. But he was the diviner spirit 
of the two. I do not think Garrison could 
have made the following appeal. It moves 
in a region of humility which is foreign to 
Garrison's nature, to his tactics and to his 
genius. Dr. Channing had been a family 
friend of the Mays, and had been particu- 
larly kind to Samuel when the latter was a 
small boy. This affectionate relationship 
had never been shaken. The story must be 
told by May himself. 

'' Late in the year 1834," says Mr. May, 
*' being on a visit in Boston, I spent several 
hours with Dr. Channing in earnest conver- 
sation upon Abolitionism and Abolitionists. 
My habitual reverence for him was such 
that I had always been apt to defer per- 
haps too readily to his opinions, or not to 
81 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

make a very stout defense of my own when 
they differed from his. But at the time to 
which I refer I had become so thoroughly 
convinced of the truth of the essential doc- 
trines of the American Anti-slavery Society, 
and so earnestly engaged in the dissemina- 
tion of them that our conversation assumed, 
more than it had ever done, the character 
of a debate. He acknowledged the ines- 
timable importance of the object we had in 
view. The evils of Slavery, he assented, 
could not be overstated. He allowed that 
removal to Africa ought not to be made 
a condition of the liberation of the enslaved. 
But he hesitated still to accept the doctrine 
of immediate emancipation. His principal 
objections, however, were alleged against 
the severity of our denunciations, the 
harshness of our epithets, the vehemence, 
heat, and excitement caused by the ha- 
rangues at our meetings, and still more by 
Mr. Garrison's Liberator. The Doctor 
dwelt upon these objections, which, if they 
were as well founded as he assumed them 
to be, lay against what was only incidental, 
not an essential part of our movement. He 
dwelt upon them until I became impa- 
tient, and, forgetting for the moment my 
wonted deference, I broke out with not a 
82 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

little warmth of expression and manner: 
" ' Dr. Channing,' I said, ' I am tired of 
these complaints. The cause of suffering 
humanity, the cause of our oppressed, 
crushed colored countrymen, has called as 
loudly upon others as upon us Abolitionists. 
It was just as incumbent upon others as 
upon us to espouse it. We are not to blame 
that wiser and better men did not espouse 
it long ago. The cry of millions, suffering 
the cruel bondage in our land, had been 
heard for half a century and disregarded. 
" The wise and prudent " saw the terrible 
wrong, but thought it not wise and prudent 
to lift a finger for its correction. The 
priests and Lev.ites beheld their robbed and 
wounded countrymen, but passed by on the 
other side. The children of Abraham held 
their peace, and at last " the very stones 
have cried out " in abhorrence of this tre- 
mendous iniquity; and you must expect 
them to cry out like " the stones." You 
must not wonder if many of those who have 
been left to take up this great cause, do not 
plead it in all that seemliness of phrase 
which the scholars and practiced rhetori- 
cians of our country might use. You must 
not expect them to manage with all the 
calmness and discretion that clergymen and 
83 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

statesmen might exhibit. But the scholars, 
the statesmen, the clergy had done nothing, 
— did not seem about to do anything, and 
for my part I thank God that at last any 
persons, be they who they may, have ear- 
nestly engaged in this cause; for no move- 
ment can be in vain. We Abolitionists are 
what we are, — babes, sucklings, obscure 
men, silly women, publicans, sinners, and we 
shall manage this matter just as might be 
expected of such persons as we are. It is 
unbecoming in abler men who stood by and 
would do nothing to complain of us because 
we do no better. 

" ' Dr. Channing,' I continued with in- 
creased earnestness, ' it is not our fault 
that those who might have conducted this 
great reform more prudently have left it to 
us to manage as we may. It is not our 
fault that those who might have pleaded for 
the enslaved so much more wisely and elo- 
quently, both with the pen and the living 
voice than we can, have been silent. We 
are not to blame, sir, that you, who, more 
perhaps than any other man, might have so 
raised the voice of remonstrance that it 
should have been heard throughout the 
length and breadth of the land, — we are 
not to blame, sir, that you have not so 
84 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

spoken. And now that inferior men have 
been compelled to speak and act against 
what you acknowledge to be an awful sys- 
tem of iniquity, it is not becoming in you 
to complain of us because we do it in an 
inferior style. Why, sir, have you not 
taken this matter in hand yourself? Why 
have you not spoken to the nation long ago, 
as you, better than any other one, could 
have spoken ? ' 

*' At this point I bethought me to whom 
I was administering this rebuke, — the man 
who stood among the highest of the great 
and good in our land, — the man whose 
reputation for wisdom and sanctity had be- 
come world-wide, — the man, too, who had 
ever treated me with the kindness of a 
father, and whom', from my childhood, I 
had been accustomed to revere more than 
any one living. I was almost overwhelmed 
with a sense of my temerity. His counte- 
nance showed that he was much moved. I 
could not suppose he would receive all I had 
said very graciously. I waited his reply in 
painful expectation. The minutes seemed 
very long that elapsed before the silence was 
broken. Then in a very subdued manner 
and in the kindliest tones of his voice he 
said, * Brother May, I acknowledge the jus- 
85 



u^ 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

tice of your reproof. I have been silent 
too long.' Never shall I forget his words, 
look and whole appearance. I then and 
there saw the beauty, the magnanimity, the 
humility of a truly great Christian soul. He 
was exalted in my esteem more even than 
before." 

Surely this is as moving an appeal as one 
man ever made to another; and the figures 
of May and Channng seem to stand as in a 
bas-relief symbolizing the old and the new 
generation. Are the caverns of Anti-slav- 
ery controversy strewn with fragments of 
such marble as this ? I know that Emerson 
used to say that eloquence was dog-cheap at 
Anti-slavery meetings; but I did not expect 
to find gestures so sublime or episodes so 
moving. The figures of Hebrew history, — 
of Jacob and Joseph, of Nathan and David, 
of Hagar and Ishmael, — rise before us in 
their solemn, soul-subduing reality; and are 
one in spirit with these Anti-slavery scenes. 

My shelves are lined with books about 
Saint Francis of Assisi; my walls are pa- 
pered with photographs of men of genius in 
Florence, and of saints in Sienna. I desire 
also to remember the saints of New Eng- 
land. We Americans are digging for art 
and for intellect in Troy, in Sardis and in 
86 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

Egypt. Let us sometimes also dig in the 
old records of our own towns; and, while 
doing so, let us pray that mind be given us 
to understand what we bring to light. 

In the year following his interview with' 
May (1836), Dr. Channing published his 
famous pamphlet on Slavery, which was of 
enormous value to the Anti-slavery cause, 
though it did not coincide with Abolition 
opinion. It condemned Slavery to heart's 
content, but did not advocate immediate ac- 
tion. The engines of rationalism and the 
fountains of morality were by Channing 
turned upon the entire subject. This was 
no half- work: it was thorough. Chan- 
ning's name carried the book into houses, 
both at the North and in the South where 
no Abolition literature could penetrate; 
and made it a mile-stone in the progress 
of Anti-slavery. Its most lasting im- 
portance to posterity, however, is that 
it proves Channing's courage, and shows 
that his occasional subserviency toward his 
Trustees was not due to a defect in his na- 
ture, but to a defect in his education, a de- 
fect in his vision. Could the matter have 
been explained to his mind through the 
elaborate machinery of his own philosophy, 
he would have broken his chains. There 
87 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

are plenty of people to whom the crucial 
problems of their own lives never get pre- 
sented in terms that they can understand. 

Abolitionists were, of course, not satisfied 
with Channing's pamphlet ; for he could not 
sanction their views ; and indeed he repeated 
many of the commonplace charges against 
them, — e. g., "that the Abolitionists exag- 
gerated the importance of their cause; that 
they sent their literature to the slave; 
that their language was too violent," — etc. 
Most of these charges appear to-day to con- 
tradict the main thesis of the book, and to 
record merely the nervous petulance of that 
age. 

The Slave Barons and their Boston 
friends were cut to the heart by Channing^s 
essay. They denounced him as an even 
more dangerous enemy than Garrison. If, 
at times, we feel dissatisfied with Chan- 
ning's caution, we should remember that he 
was a middle-aged man when these prob- 
lems arose. Channing was born in 1780; 
and Anti-slavery was an agony in the blood 
of young men, in 1829. 
A /I have referred to John Quincy Adams' 

[detestation of slavery. He was, however, 
ijiever an Abolitionist, and he did not even 
favor the abolition of slavery in the District 
88 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

of Columbia. For this latter opinion he had ^ 
the most fantastic reason; namely that, al- 
though the residents of the District had no 
votes, and were governed by Congress, nev- 
ertheless he felt himself to be all the 
more bound in honor to act during his term 
in Congress as if he were the representative 
chosen by the people of that District; that 
is, to act according to what he knew to be 
the will of his quasi constituents. But, for 
his real constituents he held no such rever- 
ence, and in his dealings with them he was 
governed by his own conscience. Such are 
the vagaries of men. 

The romantic, extravagant nature of this 
man was, at an early age, put in irons to 
law, diplomacy, politics, and administrative 
duty. He was a born agitator, who ap- 
peared at a time when his peculiar talents 
were not demanded by the age. In John 
Quincy Adams' boyhood all the talents and 
energies of this country were required for 
the assembling, setting in motion, and keep- 
ing together of the machineries of our new 
Government. There was no demand for 
an agitator, whose function is always to dis- 
place, to disperse, and to pull apart. And 
thus it happened with John Quincy Adams 
that he was never young till he was old. 
89 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

The opportunity to exercise his extraordi- 
nary talents for agitation came when he 
took his seat in Congress toward the close 
of his long, brilliant career. He proceeded 
to focus the entire attention of the country 
upon one or two points of parliamentary 
procedure. 

Now an agitator is a man who is willing 
to make use of the members of government, 
not only for the various purposes for which 
they are framed, as, e. g. — the Legislature 
to legislate, the Judiciary to adjudicate, the 
Executive to administer, etc., — but this man 
makes use of any or all of them as a ma- 
chine to spread an idea. He uses the forms 
of government as an educational apparatus. 
The branch of the Anti-slavery cause which 
it became Adams' fate to develop, was the 
conflict between Slavery and the right to 
petition. The policy of the Slave Power 
was to smother all petitions upon the sub- 
ject of Slavery which came before Con- 
gress, by laying them upon the table unread. 
During half a dozen years Adams fought 
this fight practically alone. If we picture 
lo ourselves a man who had grown up with 
the country, who had the most intimate 
recondite, passionate knowledge of its con- 
stitutional law, dedicating himself to the 
90 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

plainest proposition regarding free speech, 
and proclaiming it in the face of a howling 
but comparatively unlettered majority, who 
seethed, and raged, and raved about him like 
the waves about a light-house — we have 
John Quincy Adams at an age of over 
seventy, presenting the Abolition petitions 
in Congress. His figure is part of the Anti- 
slavery struggle. It is clear to our instinct 
that if Adams did not have Abolition in his 
veins, he had something almost as good; he 
had the thing that Abolition was the sign 
of, namely, courage. His peculiar kind of 
courage was, in one sense, not as good as 
Abolition ; for it was not an elixir. It would 
never have abolished slavery : it was not self- 
perpetuating. It would have died with him. 
Yet the passion within him, which he 
cloaked under the name of Free Speech, was 
in reality the Will to Pity, the Will to Love, 
the Will to express freely that emotional 
side of man's nature with which he himself 
was so richly endowed. This is why the 
last page of this man's life lifts him into 
a new kind of greatness. It makes no dif- 
ference what he did before this era. His 
service to the Abolition cause was propor- 
tionate to his position. His conduct showed 
the country what slavery pointed to, and 
91 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

demonstrated also the conservative nature 
of Abolition. It showed that Abolition was 
at one with the foundations of society. 
The aristocracy of Boston, during these 
years, regarded John Quincy Adams as an 
enfant terrible; but the people of Massa- 
chusetts stood by him and, in the end, ral- 
lied to congratulate him at a monster meet- 
ing. Human nature could not withhold its 
tribute of admiration. 

George Thompson, an Englishman, whose 
life had been devoted to the cause of Anti- 
slavery in the British colonies, and who 
was one of the greatest popular orators 
of that day, had done more than any 
one man to abolish West Indian Slavery; 
and it was natural that Garrison, who 
went to England in 1833 for conference 
with the victorious British Abolition- 
ists, should enlist Thompson in the Ameri- 
can cause and bring him to America. Upon 
the passage of the Act abolishing Slavery 
in the West Indies, Lord Brougham had 
risen in the House of Lords and said : " I rise 
to take the crown of this most glorious vic- 
tory from every other head, and place it 
upon George Thompson's. He has done 
more than any other man to achieve it." 

One can imagine how the Americans of 
92 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

'^^33, who set a price on the heads of their 
own compatriots when they were Abolition- 
ists, would welcome the most powerful, the 
most popular living advocate of the hated 
cause, — a stranger and an Englishman. 
Thompson was mobbed and hounded, threat- 
ened, insulted, and would have been killed 
if fate had assisted ever so little by lending 
the opportunity. I shall content myself 
with giving Mr. May's description of 
Thompson's eloquence. 

" Mr. Thompson then went on to give us 
a graphic, glowing account of the long and 
fierce conflict they had had in England for 
the abolition of slavery in the British West 
Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher 
order. His narrative became a continuous 
metaphor^ admirably sustained. He repre- 
sented the Anti-slavery enterprise in which 
he had been so long engaged as a stout, well- 
built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, 
launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to 
carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers 
in a far-distant land. He clothed all kinds 
of opposition they had met, all the difficul- 
ties they had contended with, in imagery 
suggested by the observation and experience 
of the voyager across the Atlantic in the 
most tempestuous season of the year. In 
93 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

the height of his descriptions, my attention 
was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled 
in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the 
effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen 
boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sit- 
ting together not far from the platform. 
They were completely possessed by it. 
When the ship reeled or plunged or stag- 
gered in the storms, they unconsciously 
went through the same motions. When the 
enemy attacked her, the boys took the live- 
liest part in battle, — manning the guns, or 
handing shot and shell, or pressing forward 
to repulse the boarders. When the ship 
struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell 
from their seats in the recoil. When the 
sails and topmasts were well-nigh carried 
away by the gale, they seemed to be strain- 
ing themselves to prevent the damage; and 
when at length the ship triumphantly sailed 
into her destined port with colors flying and 
signals of glad tidings floating from her 
topmast, and the shout of welcome rose 
from thousands of expectant freedmen on 
the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, 
' Hurrah ! Hurrah ! Hurrah ! ' This irre- 
pressible explosion of their feelings brought 
them at once to themselves. They blushed, 
94 



PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 

covered their faces, sank down on their 
seats, one of them upon the floor." 

It was one thing for the American to thrill 
for the hberty of Greece, Poland, or Hun- 
gary; and another to allow foreign enthu- 
siasts to thrill over American Anti-slavery. 
Thompson was marked for assassination and 
kidnapping; and a gibbet was erected for 
him in Boston. It was Thompson whom the 
mob were in search of when they caught 
Garrison at the meeting of the Female Anti- 
slavery Society, soon to be described. The 
impertinence of Thompson consisted in his 
being a foreigner, and this fact played upon 
the peculiar American weakness, — our sen- 
sitiveness to foreign opinion. *' He comes 
here from the dark corrupt institutions of 
Europe," said Mr. Sprague in Faneuil Hall, 
" to enlighten tis upon the rights of man and 
the moral duties of our own condition. Re- 
ceived by our hospitality, he stands here 
upon our soil, protected by our laws, and 
hurls ' firebrands, arrows and death ' into 
the habitations of our neighbors, and 
friends, and brothers; and when he shall 
have kindled a conflagration which is sweep- 
ing in desolation over the land, he has only 
to embark for his own country, and there 



95 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISONi 

look serenely back with indifference or ex- 
ultation upon the widespread ruin by which 
our cities are wrapt in flames, and our gar- 
ments rolled in blood. . . . If the storm 
comes, we must abide its pelting; if convul- 
sions come, we must be in the midst of them. 
To us, then, it belongs to judge of the ex- 
igencies of our own condition, to provide for 
our own safety, and perform our own duties 
without the audacious interference of for- 
eign emissaries." 

I am grateful to this man, George Thomp- 
son. He stood for courage in 1835 in Mas- 
sachusetts. He typified courage also at a 
later time during the Civil War when he 
stood with John Bright and W. E. Foster as 
the expounders of the cause of the North 
before the people of Great Britain. He was 
one of the friends of the United States to 
whom it is due that England's governing 
classes did not assist the South openly, and 
thereby give rise to an age-long, never-dying 
antagonism between England and America. 
I am glad that George Thompson lived 
to be thanked by Lincoln and his Cab- 
inet, and to be ceremoniously received in a 
House of Representatives thronged with 
the best intellects and hearts in America. 



96 



V 

THE CRISIS 

I HAVE given the foregoing sketches almost 
at random, and, where possible, in the words 
of others, in order to call up the decade be- 
tween 1830 and 1840 without myself feeling 
the responsibility of a historian, and without 
asking the reader to give a chronological at- 
tention. Facts often speak for themselves 
more truly, the less we explain them; and 
the philosophy of history is perhaps a delu- 
sion. 

It was between 1830 and 1840 that the 
real work of Garrison was done. At the 
beginning of that decade Abolition was a 
cry in the wilderness : at the end of it. Ab- 
olition was a part of the American mind. 
Garrison's occupation throughout the epoch 
was to tend his engine — his Liberator, — 
and to assist in the formation of Anti-slavery 
Societies. Every breath of the movement 
was chronicled in the Liberator^ every new 
convert wrote to Garrison for help. Gar- 
rison was the focus, the exchange, the center 
97 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

and heart of Anti-slavery activity. He was 
the channel into which the new streams 
flowed. If a drop of Abolition fell from 
the sky anywhere in America, it was found 
in the Liberator upon the following morn- 
ing. This drawing of the new men into a 
knowledge of each other made magical heat. 
Every Abolition act or thought went im- 
mediately into the general Abolition con- 
sciousness. It was Garrison who caused the 
heat-lightning of 1825 to turn into the thun- 
derbolts of 1835. I^is gift of doing this I 
was his greatness. 

We must imagine Garrison then, as 
always, behind and underneath the ma- 
chinery and in touch with all the forces at 
work, writing away at his terrible Lib- 
erator, — fomenting, rebuking, retorting, 
supporting, expounding, thundering, scold- 
ing. The continuousness of Garrison is ap- 
palling, and fatigues even the retrospective 
imagination of posterity: he is like an all- 
night hotel : he is possessed : he is like some- 
thing let loose. I dread the din of him. I 
cover my head and fix my mind on other 
things; but there is Garrison hammering 
away, till he catches my eye and forces me 
to attend to him. If Garrison can do this to 
me, who am protected from dread of him by 
98 



THE CRISIS 

eighty years of intervening time, think 
how his lash must have fallen upon the thin 
skins of our ancestors ! 

Garrison, then, and his propaganda went 
forward; the South under its resentment 
swelled and fretted, and every phase of the 
matter was day by day recorded in the Lib- 
erator, which remains as the inexhaustible 
coal bed and historical deposit of these 
things. Every leaf and twig, every letter, 
every quarrel, every prayer, is here pre- 
served in the immortality of petrifac- 
tion. To be in himself the focalization 
and to leave behind him the fossilization 
of that wonderful epoch was Garrison's 
function. 

The crisis in the struggle came in 1835-6, 
when a great attempt was seriously made 
by the whole organized force of the Slave 
Power to put down the Abolitionists. This 
suppression was to be done in the or- 
dinary, historic way, — through laws to be 
made against them, and through violence, 
where law fell short. It will be seen in an 
instant that law was, throughout, on the 
side of the Abolitionists; and this is the 
reason why the violence was so great. The 
South could not get at Garrison through 
sheriffs and jailers. Therefore it was 
99 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

tempted to resort to riots and extra-legal ter- 
rorism. It was lured into the fabrication of 
myths, — as for instance, the myth that the 
constitution protected slavery against ad- 
verse opinion, the myth that the Abolition- 
ists favored slave-insurrection, the myth 
that the language of the Abolitionists v^as so 
extreme as to make them the enemies of so- 
ciety, the exceedingly absurd myth that to 
send Anti-slavery publications through the 
United States mails directed to adult white 
men in the South was, somehow, an atro- 
cious outrage. 

The truth is that between 1830 and 1835, 
the element of passion was rising past the 
danger point, and running into something 
like insanity in the Southern mind. A mad- 
man believes his own logic, and ever drives 
it further. The failure of law to protect 
the South left no accurate demarcation as 
to their demands. At the beginning, the 
slave-holders protested that Garrison should 
be silenced, because he was a fanatic ; but be- 
fore long they were demanding that the 
Abolitionists should be hanged, and were 
mingling the name of Channing in their 
execrations. In the beginning they de- 
manded only to be let alone ; but before long 
they were swearing that the South should 
100 



THE CRISIS 

buy and sell slaves underneath Bunker Hill 
monument. 

This tidal fury could not be conciliated. 
Anything that threatened the existence of 
Slavery stimulated the fury — and the time 
had come when all nature began to threaten 
Slavery. Slavery began, in fact, to stalk 
abroad and horrify the world: Slavery came 
out of its lair. At first there were meetings 
in the South, destruction of Abolition liter- 
ature in the mails; then white Vigilance 
Committees, and State legislatures called, in 
chorus, upon the North to stop the plague 
of Abolition by the enactment of stringent 
laws against the reformers. A giant dem- 
onstration was planned by the friends of 
the South to take' place at Faneuil Hall in 
Boston — 1500 names being appended to 
the call for the meeting. This meeting was 
to demonstrate the good faith of the North 
towards the slaveholders, and to give public 
opinion a set towards the enactment of 
criminal statutes against Anti-slavery. The 
meeting was a tremendous success and 
proved to be a sort of " view-halloo " for 
Slavery. It was naturally followed by an 
increase of riots and mob violence again?^ 
the Abolitionists. The most important r : 
the new ebullitions was the so called Boston 

lOI 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

mob (October 21, 1835), which led Garri- 
son about with a rope round him, — and 
j/\ might easily have ended in his death. Gen- 
eral Jackson, the President of the United 
States, referred to the recent Pro-slavery 
demonstration at the North in his Message 
to Congress, in December, 1835. 

" It is fortunate for the country," he says, 
*' that the good sense, the generous feeling, 
and the deep-rooted attachment of the peo- 
ple of the non-slaveholding States to the 
Union, and to their fellow citizens of the 
same blood in the South, have given so 
strong and inpressive a tone to the senti- 
ments entertained against the proceedings of 
the misguided persons who have engaged in 
these unconstitutional and wicked attempts 
[*to circulate through the mails inflamma- 
tory appeals addressed to the passions of the 
slaves']." 

Here was support from high quarters. 
It was not till January, 1836, that the time 
came for Edward Everett, Governor of 
Massachusetts, to take notice of the entreat- 
ies of the Southern States. In his Message 
to the Massachusetts Legislature he intimated 
that the Abolitionists could be punished un- 
der the law as it stood : because " whatever 
by direct and necessary operation is calcula- 
102 



THE CRISIS 

ted to excite insurrection among slaves may 
be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common 
law." This part of his Message was re- 
ferred to a joint Committee of Five of the 
Legislature, together with the Southern en- 
treaties. It was in the hearings before this 
committee, that the work was done which 
put an end to Southern hopes of enslaving 
Massachusetts. The great attempt was 
foiled. The South had done its utmost to 
suppress Abolition, and had failed. After 
this time, Abolition is in the field as an ac- 
cepted fact. Within eight years thereafter, 
in 1844, Birney was nominated for the 
Presidency as the candidate of a third party. 
We must think of this whole Southern 
movement as a big, mountainous wave, in- 
volving multitudinous lesser waves and ed- 
dies, which, as it rolled forward and surged 
back, created complex disturbances, all inter- 
locked with one another. The power of the 
South was exerted over the President at 
Washington and over the ruffian on the 
street corner, and it was all one power, one 
pull together, one control. Let us take a 
rapid but clear glance over certain stages of 
the movement which have already been men- 
tioned. The popular feeling at the South, 
which was the motive power of the whole 
103 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

affair, may be illustrated in a paragraph from 
the Richmond Whig: 

"Let the hell-hounds of the North be- 
ware. Let them not feel too much security 
in their homes, or imagine that they who 
throw firebrands, although from, as they 
think, so safe a distance, will be permitted to 
escape with impunity. There are thousands 
now animated with a spirit to brave every 
danger to bring these felons to justice on the 
soil of the Southern States, whose women 
and children they have dared to endan- 
ger by their hell-concocted plots. We have 
feared that Southern exasperation would 
seize some of the prime conspirators in their 
very beds, and drag them to meet the pun- 
ishment due their offenses. We fear it no 
longer. We hope it may be so, and our ap- 
plause as one man shall follow the success- 
ful enterprise." 

This then is the outer ring of fiery feeling 
which dreamed of moving Northward and 
doing, it knew not what, to put down Aboli- 
tion. The spirit of violence, as shown, for 
instance, in the breaking into of the United 
States Post-office at Charleston, S. C, and 
the seizing of Abolition newspapers for a 
bonfire, was redoubled by the attitude of 
the Federal authorities. The United States 
104 



THE CRISIS 

Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, a Mas- 
sachusetts man, approved the deed. Now, 
the only reason why riots do not occur every 
day, accompanied by destruction of property 
and injury to unoffending persons, is that 
the strong arm of law and order is 
against the ubiquitous loafer and ruffian. 
Once let this gentleman see a chance of riot- 
ing with impunity, and he instantly appears 
and riots. How easily then did disturb- 
ances follow when State and National of- 
ficials, as well as the rich and respectable 
classes, gave the cue. The average man at 
the time we are chronicling really believed 
that the Abolitionist was a criminal in es- 
sence, and ought to be proclaimed as such by 
law. 

The Anti-slavery writers, in describing 
this period, use the terminology of fiercer 
times. Harriet Martineau calls it a " Mar- 
tyr Age," and we constantly hear of the 
" reign of terror " in 1835. Now the term 
" persecution '' is apt to call up in our minds 
the fiercest images of history, scenes of 
bloodshed and tyranny, combats with wild 
beasts in the amphitheater, executions in the 
market-place, men driven to hide in caves in 
the rocks, etc. The unpleasantnesses and 
injustices to which the Abolitionists were 
105 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

subjected never justified a literal appli- 
cation of the terms " martyr," " reign of 
terror," etc. ; but the word " persecution " 
is most aptly used to describe their 
sufferings, if we reflect that there are 
persecutions which do not result in death. 
Prudence Crandall was certainly persecu- 
ted; the Abolitionist was harassed and his 
life was made as uncomfortable as the law 
would permit. The outrages, both legal and 
extra legal, which fell upon anti-slavery 
people, may be studied at leisure in the press 
of the time. They lie upon any page of the 
history of that day. The following are 
severe cases. They are mentioned in the 
large life of Garrison: 

" Dr. Reuben Crandall, a perfectly inno- 
cent man and younger brother of Prudence 
Crandall, was thrown into a noisome jail in 
Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, on 
a charge of * circulating Tappan, Garrison & 
Company's papers, encouraging the negroes 
to insurrection,' for which a mob would fain 
have lynched him. ... It was nearly 
a year before he was brought to trial, and 
meantime his health had been ruined." 

" Five thousand dollars were offered on 
the Exchange in New York for the head of 
Arthur Tappan on Friday last," writes 
io6 



THE CRISIS 

Henry Benson to Garrison. " Elizur 
Wright is barricading his house with shut- 
ters, bars and bolts." 

" How imminent is the danger that hovers 
about the persons of our friends George 
Thompson and Arthur Tappan!" writes 
Garrison to George Benson. " Rewards for 
the seizure of the latter are multiplying — 
in one place they offer three thousand dollars 
for his ears — a purse has been made up, 
publicly, of $20,000, in New Orleans for his 
person. I, too, — I desire to bless God, — 
am involved in almost equal peril. I have 
have just received a letter written evidently 
by a friendly hand, in which I am apprised 
that * my life is sought after, and a reward 
of $20,000 has been offered for my head by 
six Mississippians.' He says — * Beware of 
the assassin ! May God protect you ! ' and 
signs himself ' A Marylander, and a resi- 
dent of Philadelphia.' " 

" Typical cases were the town-meeting 
appointment of a vigilance committee to 
prevent Anti-slavery meetings in Canaan, N. 
H. ; the arrest of the Rev. George Storrs, at 
Northfield, in the same State, in a friendly 
pulpit, at the close of a discourse on slavery, 
as a * common brawler/ and his subsequent 
sentence by a * justice of the peace ' to hard 
107 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

labor in the House of Correction for three 
months (not sustained on appeal) ; and the 
repeated destruction of Birney's Philan- 
thropist printing-office by the * gentlemen of 
property and standing ' in Cincinnati — an 
outrage bearing a close resemblance to that 
engendered by the Faneuil Hall meeting, and 
ending in a midnight raid upon the colored 
homes of the city, with the connivance of 
the mayor." 

As for mere social ostracism, — the refusal 
on the part of Beacon Street to ask Wendell 
Phillips to dinner, the black-balling at the 
Clubs in New York of distinguished Aboli- 
tionists, — the Muse of History cannot re- 
cord these things among her tragedies. We 
have seen, in the case of Henry I. Bowditch 
and his walk with Douglass, upon what plane 
the drama moved. It was a drama of char- 
acter, rather than a drama of blood. 
The Anti-slavery people are, however, not 
inexcusable in calling this epoch " the reign 
of terror.'* It was, at any rate, a reign of 
brickbats and anathema, which developed 
here and there into tarring and feathering 
and murder. The reason why it did not 
turn into a veritable reign of terror, a time 
of proscription and execution, is that the 
middle classes at the North awoke out of 
io8 



THE CRISIS 

their lethargy, and protected the reformers 
instead of oppressing them. The passions 
were there ; the introverted enthusiasm of the 
South and the martyr spirit of the AboHtion- 
ist were there. There also was the pliant 
tool between them — the Northern business 
man. This tool, however, broke. 

The great meeting in Faneuil Hall, al- 
ready spoken of, a meeting attended by nu- 
merous Southerners who made the journey 
to Boston on purpose, represents the apogee 
of the Sun of Liberty in America. In con- 
sidering this meeting we are again baffled by 
the strangeness of its historic atmosphere; 
the low pulse of the Northerner is a puzzle 
to us. It is easy to understand and sym- 
pathize with the Southern tiger bereft of his 
prey, and with the Northern lamb who lifts 
up his voice for justice before being de- 
voured. The first is the typical tyrant, and 
the second the typical saint. The conduct, 
however, of the Massachusetts Philistine, 
who looks like an educated gentleman and 
acts the part of a terrified servant, is a dif- 
ficult thing to understand. We can get a 
sidelong glimpse into the mystery by remem- 
bering how people behave in moments of 
panic, — with what meanness, with what ir- 
rational thoughtlessness, with what denial of 
109 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

their true selves. Now the Massachusetts 
statesmen, business men, and persons of dis- 
tinction and wealth, had lived for years in a 
state of continuous panic. This had shred- 
ded them into spectres. It is quite true that 
there was a spiritual " reign of terror " at 
this epoch, a terror which intimately affected 
all classes, and the Abolitionists' phrase is 
thus truer than it seemed. 

Peleg Sprague, one of Massachusetts* 
most distinguished men, a United States 
Senator and former Congressman, and a 
thoroughly representative mouthpiece of the 
Conservative classes at the North, spoke as 
follows at the memorable Pro-slavery meet- 
ing in Faneuil Hall : 

" Time was, when ... the generous 
and gallant Southrons came to our aid, and 
our fathers refused not to hold communion 
with slaveholders. . . . When He, that 
slaveholder (pointing to the full-length por- 
trait of Washington), who from this can- 
vas smiles upon you — his children — with 
paternal benignity, came with other slave- 
holders to drive the British myrmidons from 
this city and this hall, our father did not re- 
fuse to hold communion with him or them. 
With slaveholders they formed the Confed- 
eration, neither asking nor receiving any 
no 



THE CRISIS 

right to interfere in their domestic relations ; 
with them they made the Declaration of In- 
dependence, coming from the pen of that 
other slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, a name 
dear to every friend of human rights. 
And in the original draft of that Declara- 
tion was contained a most eloquent passage 
upon this very topic of negro slavery, which 
was stricken out in deference to the wishes 
of members from the South." 

There is something about this language so 
far removed from good sense that it gives us 
pause. That something is the influence of 
terror. Mr. Garrison Gray Otis, who 
moved on a still higher social plane than 
Sprague, nay, who stood very near the gods. 
in the imagination of Bostonians, spoke as 
follows : 

" I deny that any body of men can law- 
fully associate for the purpose of undermin- 
ing, more than for overthrowing, the gov- 
ernment of our sister States. There may 
be no statute to make such combinations 
penal, because the offense is of a new com- 
plexion." 

Mr. Otis found an even stronger objec- 
tion to the Society in " its evident direction 
towards becoming a political association, 
whose object it will be, and whose tendency 
III 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

now IS, to bear directly upon the ballot-boxes 
and to influence the elections," as in the re- 
cent case of Abbott Lawrence. " How soon 
might you see a majority in Congress re- 
turned under the influence of (Anti-slavery) 
associations ? '' 

Otis* reasoning here is the chattering of 
teeth. "The ballot box and election!" — 
why not? The slavery issue to come into 
politics, — who can prevent it? Where are 
we? Who is talking? Have I read that 
sentence aright? Such questions go 
through one's mind no matter how often 
one re-reads these speeches. It must be con- 
fessed that a city is not far from chaos when 
so much passion and so faint a rationality 
can go forth as the voice of her powerful 
classes, and of her educated men. The situ- 
ation was greatly alleviated by the good 
sense and calmness of the Abolitionists ; for 
although Garrison's language was generally 
blatant, his conduct was invariably exem- 
plary; and the reformers' course of action in 
legal and legislative maneuvering was often 
brilliant in the extreme. 

The Boston Abolitionists behaved during 
this trying season with circumspection. 
After the Faneuil Hall demonstration, 
Mayor Lyman, who had presided at that 

112 



THE CRISIS 

meeting, had, in a courteous if not friendly 
manner, privately counseled them to dis- 
continue their meetings while the public 
mind was so heated, at the same time assur- 
ing them that he would protect them in their 
rights if they chose to exercise them. They 
therefore held only their constitutional 
meetings; and it was one of these which 
fell due on Wednesday, October 14, the an- 
niversary of the formation of the Boston 
Female Anti-slavery Society. This meeting 
was postponed and duly advertised for Octo- 
ber 21, 1835. On that day a Pro-slavery 
mob, organized by newspaper men and busi- 
ness men, and composed of from two to five 
thousand particularly respectable persons, 
was got together for the purpose of tarring 
and feathering George Thompson, who was 
believed to be at the meeting. As Thomp- 
son was not to be found, the mob cried out 
for Garrison. It surged into the women's 
meeting where Garrison was. For some 
time the thirty women went forward with 
their prayers and proceedings while the mob 
howled upon them. Garrison left the meet- 
ing in order to protect it, but could not es- 
cape from the building on account of the 
crowd. He therefore retreated across the 
hall to the Anti-slavery office which hap- 
113 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

pened to be in the same building. Thither 
the crowd followed him. 

" An assault," according to Garrison's ac- 
count of the matter, " was now made upon 
the door of the office, the lower panel of 
which was instantly dashed to pieces. 
Stooping down and glaring upon me as I sat 
at the desk, writing an account of the riot 
to a distant friend, the ruffians cried out — 
* There he is ! That's Garrison ! Out with 
the scoundrel ! ' etc., etc. Turning to Mr. 
Burleigh, I said — * You may as well open 
the door, and let them come in and do their 
worst' But he, with great presence of 
mind, went out, locked the door, put the key 
in his pocket, and by his admirable firmness 
succeeded in keeping the office safe." 

Mayor Lyman now appeared upon the 
scene, and prevailed upon the women to 
adjourn. They passed down the staircase 
" amid manifestations of revengeful bru- 
tality " and so, in a close column, to the 
house of Francis Jackson, a new and power- 
ful recruit to their cause. Mayor Lyman 
now had to deal with the mob. Their at- 
tention had been attracted to the Anti-slav- 
ery sign-board and Mayor Lyman permitted 
its demolition by the crowd, a betrayal of 
his trust as custodian of property and of the 
114 



THE CRISIS 

peace which Garrison never forgave. The 
Mayor thereupon devoted his energies to 
helping Garrison to make good his escape 
from the mob. Garrison was induced to 
get out of a rear window, and one of the 
sheriffs, in order to persuade the crowd to 
disperse, announced that Garrison had es- 
caped. The crowd, however, got on his 
track and followed after him. It came up 
with him in a carpenter's shop. The 
crowd was made up of both friends and 
foes. 

*' On seeing me," continues Garrison, 
" three or four of the rioters, uttering a yell, 
furiously dragged me to the window, with 
the intention of hurling me from that height 
to the ground; but one of them relented and 
said — ' Don't let us kill him outright.' So 
they drew me back, and coiled a rope about 
my body — probably to drag me through 
the streets. I bowed to the mob, and re- 
questing them to wait patiently until I could 
descend, went down upon a ladder that was 
raised for that purpose. I fortunately ex- 
tricated myself from the rope, and was 
seized by two or three powerful men, to 
whose firm.ness, policy and muscular energy 
I am probably indebted for my preservation. 
They led me along bareheaded (for I had 
IIS 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

lost my hat), through a mighty crowd, ever 
and anon shouting, * He shan't be hurt ! 
You shan't hurt him! Don't hurt him! 
He is an American,' etc., etc. This seemed 
to excite sympathy among many in the 
crowd, and they reiterated the cry, * He 
shan't be hurt!'" 

At this point we will turn to Charles Bur- 
leigh's tale : " Going to the Post-office, I saw 
the crowd pouring out from Wilson's Lane 
into State Street with a deal of clamor and 
shouting, and heard the exulting cry, 
* They've got him — they've got him.' And 
so, sure enough, they had. The tide set to- 
ward the south door of the City Hall, and 
in a few minutes I saw Garrison between 
two men who held him and led him along, 
while the throng pressed on every side, as 
if eager to devour him alive. His head was 
bare, his face a little more highly colored 
than in his most tranquil moments, as if 
flushed by moderate exercise, and his counte- 
nance composed." In the upshot. Mayor 
Lyman's efforts to save him were successful ; 
and Garrison was forthwith jailed for the 
night as a disturber of the peace. 

Throughout this episode Garrison acted 
with wisdom and courage. Had he behaved 
in any different manner, had he shown fight, 
ii6 



THE CRISIS 

as Love joy did at Alton, had his followers 
become exasperated, bloodshed would prob- 
ably have followed and the whole contro- 
versy in Boston would thenceforth have been 
overcast by the spirit of civil war. The 
thing to be noted is that Garrison's conduct 
during this mob was an exemplification of 
the whole Anti-slavery policy, which had 
been fully set out in the documents and liter- 
ature of the movement during the preceding 
five years. Moral agitation with no resort 
to force, no resistance to force, was the Ab- 
olition watchword. 

When a whole age is completely insane 
upon some subject, sane views upon that 
subject will seem like madness to the age. 
It was thus perfectly normal that the as- 
sembly of moderate and holy persons who 
met in Philadelphia to form the national 
Anti-slavery Society in 1833, and parted, as 
we have seen, with tears and prayers, — 
should have been both watched and guarded 
by the police. These men seemed to that age 
like dangerous malefactors. So also was it 
accordant with spiritual law that Garrison 
should have been shut up as a rioter on the 
night following the Boston mob. He was 
a man of little humor where his principles 
were at stake, and could see nothing in the 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

arrest but a ghastly paradox; whereas in 
reality that arrest is a charming epitome of 
the times. 

How much danger was Garrison in while 
being dragged and hustled through the 
streets of Boston? Was there a pot of hot 
tar and a bath of feathers waiting at some 
convenient corner, which would have been 
produced and set in operation on the Com- 
mon, but for Mayor Lyman's timely inter- 
ference? Very likely there was. There 
seems to have been a plan to maltreat 
Thompson, which plan was divulged to the 
public through broadsides and to Garrison 
through anonymous letters, one of the let- 
ters being friendly. We see the Garrison 
mob to-day as the sticking-point of violence 
in Boston. We know that this mob was not 
followed by a series of mobs. We see 
that it did no damage to speak of ; and there- 
fore we cannot help thinking of it as a harm- 
less affair. But a mob has always some- 
thing devilish and incalculable in its action, 
and a mob led by gentlemen, a mob in which 
the ruffian saw that he was supported by the 
Bank President, and that no prosecution 
could possibly follow in the wake of the day, 
might be the most dangerous of all mobs. 
The experience of Birney and his press in 
^ ii8 



THE CRISIS 

Ohio, of Lovejoy and his press in Illinois, 
the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Phila- 
delphia and countless other acts of violence 
show that the Abolitionists did right to be 
alarmed. 

As a matter of fact they were seriously 
frightened. Though Garrison and the 
ladies put on as bold a front as they could, 
they did not feel like shaking hands with 
their old friend Mayor Lyman and regard- 
ing that mob as a joke. There was, after 
all, a real and terrific force at the back of 
the mob. It was the mob of the Richmond 
Whig, of the Faneuil Hall Pro-Slavery meet- 
ing. The Southern fire had moved North, 
and seemed to encircle the Anti-slavery agi- 
tators. The " gentlemen of property and 
standing " — to use the pompous newspaper 
phrase of the day, — who led the mob, were 
actuated by one of the major passions of hu- 
manity, — defense of property. 

For in a big sense, in a metaphorical sense, 
the South was right; and all this Abolition 
movement was a servile uprising. The slave 
heart and soul had somehow come into com- 
munion with the Anti-slavery heart and soul^ 
and together they were generating an earth- 
quake beneath the slaver's feet. This 
whole religious message is mirrored in 
119 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

*' Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book which it took 
twenty years of AboHtion to make the soil 
for. " Uncle Tom's Cabin " appeared in 
1852 and is to-day our key to that whole 
epoch: but the vision of that book was in 
the heart of the Anti-slavery people long 
before. They gave that vision to the world ; 
they gave it to Harriet Beecher. The pic- 
tures and thoughts of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " 
were sown into the mind of Harriet Beecher 
as a child; the emotion of it was generated 
in 1829. And so the early instinct to put 
down this whole movement as a servile in- 
surrection had justification in fact. 

As a general rule servile insurrections are 
put down by officials ; by judges, sheriffs and 
troops. Historic reasons made this course 
not feasible at the North. Therefore the 
deluded upper classes of Boston, who had 
thrown in their fortunes with slavery, did 
what all determined men do when law fails 
them, — they took the field personally. The 
women who marched through the rioters 
trembled with antagonism, if not with fear. 
One of them wrote afterwards : 

" When we emerged into the open day- 
light, there went up a roar of rage and con- 
tempt, which increased when they saw that 
we did not intend to separate, but walked 
120 



THE CRISIS 

in regular procession. They slowly gave 
way as we came out. As far as we could 
look either way the crowd extended — evi- 
dently of the so-called * wealthy and respect- 
able/ * the moral worth,' ' the influence and 
standing.' We saw the faces of those we 
had, till now, thought friends; men whom 
we never before met without giving the 
hand in friendly salutation; men whom till 
now we should have called upon for con- 
demnation of ruffianism, with confidence 
that the appeal would be answered." 

There is something old-world, something 
more like the Eighteenth Century than the 
Nineteenth in this scene ; I would not miss it 
out of our history. But the people who took 
part in it could never think of it lightly. 
It was too real, too fierce, too dangerous. 
The mob was too near, and its genteel char- 
acter was unpleasant. I have at times 
thought that the Anti-slavery people were 
almost ungrateful to Theodore Lyman. To 
them he was a man who had not done his 
duty; he should have protected their sign. 
He should have defied and dispersed the 
rioters, instead of conciliating the mob and 
dispersing the ladies' meeting. He should 
have jailed the ringleaders in the riot and 
conducted Garrison in safety to his home. 

121 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

And yet, for an official during a great mania, 
and for a man by nature timid during a riot, 
he seems to me to have done fairly well. 
He appeared upon the scene of conflict, and 
in the end saved Garrison from the clutches 
of the mob. The Abolitionists, like lavv^yers 
in a jury case, never missed a point; and 
the points against Lyman were obvious. 
He was a pawn in their demonstration. It 
was their function to throw up a clear sil- 
houette of the times, and to show just how 
far Theodore Lyman had fallen short of 
efficient courage, and Boston, of liberty. 
We cannot hold them to the historic per- 
spective, nor expect them to display a ju- 
dicial temper upon the matter. 

I myself, however, feel grateful to Ly- 
man for saving Garrison; though I also re- 
spect Garrison for not altering his criticism 
by an iota because of the personal question. 
He could not step aside for a moment and 
play the part of philosophic spectator. As 
well expect a point which is moving 
in a curve in obedience to an alge- 
braical formula to change its course for 
reasons of politeness. Let us not forget 
that all these people were wound up, and 
that each man and each group of men in the 
struggle was following a track like one of 

122 



THE CRISIS 

the heavenly bodies; being governed by a 
logic, unseen, mighty, and terrible, leading 
to greater things. 

The Boston mob gives a barometrical rec- 
ord of conditions in the North in 1835. 
Every village had its Garrison, its Mayor 
Lyman, its Francis Jackson. Moved by 
the spectacle of Garrison's persecution, 
Charles Sumner, Henry I. Bowditch and 
Wendell Phillips became converts to the 
cause. Every village in the North after 
October 21, produced its Bowditch, its Sum- 
ner, its Phillips. There were now six State 
and three hundred auxiliary Anti-slavery 
Societies all formed since 183 1. " So 
then," comments Garrison, " we derive from 
our opponents these instructive but paradox- 
ical facts — that without numbers, we are 
multitudinous; that without power, we are 
sapping the foundations of the-Confederacy; 
that without a plan, we are hastening the 
abolition of slavery; and without reason 
or talent we are rapidly converting the 
nation." 

For the second time within three months 
it became wise for Garrison to leave Bos- 
ton. His landlord, quite naturally, feared 
for the safety of his house. The printing- 
office of the Liberator was closed, and the 
123 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

work was done clandestinely elsewhere. 
During this winter the Abolitionists kept 
rather quiet ; but they emerged in the spring 
to attend the Lunt Committee, — that Com- 
mittee appointed by Governor Everett to con- 
sider the requests from Southern legislatures 
that Massachusetts should do something to 
suppress Anti-slavery. The first hearing in 
the matter was held on March 4th, 1836, at 
the State House. The audience was so large 
that the Hall of the House of Representa- 
tives had to be used. Many women, includ- 
ing Harriet Martineau, were there, and the 
social, political and mercantile classes of 
Boston were represented. When the meet- 
ing came to order Samuel J. May set forth 
the history of Abolition and showed the 
mildness of its methods. Ellis Gray Lor- 
ing, one of the earliest aristocrats to join 
the cause, reviewed the perfect legality of 
the ideals and conduct of the Anti-slavery 
Societies. The gentle Charles Follen, a 
learned and saintly man, began to expound 
the rights of man and to explain to the com- 
mittee the natural sequence of cause and ef- 
fect which existed between the Faneuil Hall 
Pro-slavery meeting in August and the treat- 
ment of Garrison by the mob in October. 
Chairman Lunt, who seems to have been a 
124 



THE CRISIS 

narrow partisan who little understood the 
issue under discussion, and who thought it 
his duty towards his constituents to brow- 
beat the reformers, declined to allow Follen 
to pursue this line of argument. The Abo- 
litionists, upon this rebuff, brought the hear- 
ing promptly to a close, asserting that they 
must be allowed to make their own argu- 
ments or none. They immediately peti- 
tioned the Legislature for permission to 
argue their own case in their own way be- 
fore the Committee. This militant front 
assumed by the little body of Protestants 
was a very able piece of tactics. Their real 
appeal was, of course, directed to the grand 
public, — not to the public of the city of 
Boston, but to the people of the State of 
Massachusetts who were watching the whole 
proceeding with passionate interest. Would 
the Legislature dare to refuse the Abo- 
litionists permission to present their own 
arguments in their own way? The permis- 
sion was granted. 

The second hearing before the Lunt Com- 
mittee was a stormy one. It was naturally 
crowded, because of the issues raised by the 
first. Mr. Lunt behaved, strange to say, 
with the same singular stupidity as at the 
first meeting. Let us remember that this 
125 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

hearing was for the moment the center of 
the great storm of passion that had moved 
up from the South during the preceding 
year and by which it was hoped that the 
Abolition cause would be engulfed and ob- 
literated. The center of the storm, how- 
ever, is perfectly calm. The voice that 
comes from it is not a still small voice, but 
a very calm voice. It is the voice of Sam- 
uel J. May. " It seemed," said Mr. May, 
addressing the chairman, " it seemed on the 
4th instant that the chairman considered 
that we came here by his grace to exculpate 
ourselves from the charges alleged against 
us by the legislatures of several of the 
Southern States ; and that we were not to be 
permitted to express our anxious apprehen- 
sions of the effects of any acts by our Legis- 
lature intended to gratify the wishes of those 
States. In order, therefore, that we might 
appear before you in the exercise of our 
right as free citizens, we have appealed to 
the Senate and House of Representatives, 
and have their permission to do so. Dr. 
Follen was setting before you what we deem 
the most serious evil to be apprehended from 
any condemnatory resolutions which the 
Legislature might be induced to pass; and 
if he is not permitted to press this upon 
126 



THE CRISIS 

your consideration our interview with the 
Committee must end here." 

Mr. Follen was allowed by the chairman 
to proceed, but the following speaker, Rev. 
William Goodell, was compelled to sit down 
by the chairman. He was at the moment in 
the midst of a most telling quotation from 
Gov. McDuffy, of South Carolina, who had 
said that '' the laboring population of no na- 
tion on earth are entitled to liberty or capa- 
ble of enjoying it.'* " Sit down," said Mr. 
Lunt, '^ the Committee will hear no more of 
it." The Abolitionists immediately and 
meekly showed their compliance by begin- 
ning to leave the Hall. 

This is magnificent agitation : it is impos- 
sible for reformers t6 be more able than this. 
Such conduct sends out an appeal to com- 
mon sense, to justice, to fair play, to the 
mind of the average man and of the cour- 
ageous person everywhere. And lo, before 
the Hall had emptied itself, there came a re- 
sponse to that appeal, a response from one 
whose mere name was a summary of the 
traditions he spoke for. " The audience 
here began to leave the Hall," continues Mr. 
May, " but were arrested by a voice in their 
midst. It was the voice of Gamaliel Brad- 
ford, not a member of the Anti-slavery So- 
127 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ciety, who had come there only as a specta- 
tor, but had been so moved by what he had 
witnessed that he pronounced an eloquent, 
thrilling, impassioned, but respectful ap- 
peal in favor of free discussion." When 
Bradford sat down Mr. George Bond, one 
of the most prominent merchants and esti- 
mable gentlemen of Boston, made a speech 
to the same effect. 

Abolition thus began to penetrate the stal- 
wart and sensible classes. It could no longer 
be regardjed as merely the infatuation of 
foolish persons. There were still to be years 
of struggle, but the loneliness was at an end. 
The great shattering climax of all this pe- 
riod was the murder of Elijah P. Love joy, a 
young Presbyterian minister and native of 
Maine, on November 7th, 1837, at Alton, 
111. He was shot down as he emerged from 
the burning building in which the last of 
four Anti-slavery printing-presses perished 
at the hands of infuriated pro-slavery 
rioters. Love joy, though a clergyman, had 
determined to protect his rights of free 
speech under the Constitutional forms of 
self-defense. He and his friends had 
armed themselves according to law, and 
were under the protection of the Mayor of 
the town. They thus stood like the embat- 
128 



THE CRISIS 

tied farmer at Lexington, — nay, more 
strongly, for these men were not Revolu- 
tionists, but peaceful citizens resisting illegal 
violence. Love joy v^as ruthlessly shot 
down by a shower of bullets from the street. 
Here was something that the average Ameri- 
can could understand. It was not expressed 
in biblical language, nor did it come from a 
saint; but it spoke to the fighting instinct in 
the common man. 

Nothing except John Brown's Raid ever 
sent such a shock across the continent, or so 
stirred the North to understand and to re- 
sist the advance of slavery as Lovejoy's 
murder. The Abolitionists of Boston im- 
mediately sought Faneuil Hall, which was 
at first refused. Dr. Channing, head- 
ing the free-speech movement, joined 
with the Abolitionists in claiming the 
right to use the Hall. It was felt that the 
great public was behind this claim: the use 
of the Hall was granted. There followed 
that meeting to which the dazzling elo- 
quence of Wendell Phillips has given im- 
mortality. It was a free-speech, not an 
Abolition meeting, its object being to pro- 
test against Lovejoy's murder as a crime 
against the statutory right of free speech. 

We see here a very different situation 
129 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

f 

from the state of things at the Faneuil Hall 
Pro-slavery meeting of 1835, when slavery 
had hired the Hall and held the floor. At 
the Love joy meeting freedom had hired the 
Hall and held the floor. Nevertheless the 
meeting was to some extent packed by the 
Pro-slavery element who hoped to stampede 
it in favor of the South. Phillips was an 
unknown young lawyer, the scion of a very 
distinguished family, and he had gone to the 
meeting without any intention of taking 
part in its proceedings. He was drawn into 
the fray by the extraordinary speech of 
James T. Austin, attorney-general of Mas- 
sachusetts and leader of the conservatives. 
Austin declared that Love joy was not only 
presumptuous and imprudent while he lived, 
but that he " died as the fool dieth." He 
compared the murderers of Love joy with 
the men who destroyed the tea in Boston 
harbor, and said that wherever the Aboli- 
tion fever raged there were mobs and mur- 
ders. Austin was vociferously applaudedl 
and there was some prospect that the whole 
meeting would break up in a riot. Phil- 
lips had great difficulty in getting the atten- 
tion of the audience. " Mr. Chairman," he 
said, " we have met for the freest discussion 
of these resolutions and the events which 
130 



THE CRISIS 

gave rise to them/' (Cries of " question/' 
" hear him/' *' go on/' *' no gagging " — 
etc.) "I hope I shall be permitted to ex- 
press my surprise at the sentiments of the 
last speaker, — surprise not only at such sen- 
timents from such a man, but at the applause 
they have received within these walls. A 
comparison has been drawn between the 
events of the Revolution and the tragedy at 
Alton. We have heard it asserted here, in 
Faneuil Hall, that Great Britain had a right 
to tax the Colonies ; and we have heard the 
mob at Alton, the drunken murderers of 
Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers 
who threw the tea overboard! (Great ap- 
plause.) Fellow-citizens, is this Faneuil 
Hall doctrine? " C No, no.") After giv- 
ing a clear exposition of the difference be- 
tween the riot at Alton and the Boston Tea 
Party, Phillips continued : " Sir, when I 
heard the gentleman lay down principles 
which place the murderers of Alton side by 
side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy 
and Adams, I thought those pictured lips 
(pointing to the portraits in the Hall) 
would have broken into voice to rebuke the 
recreant American, — the slanderer of the 
dead. (Great applause and counter ap- 
plause.) The gentleman said that he should 

131 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

sink into insignificance if he dared not gain- 
say the principles of these resolutions. 
Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on 
soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans, 
and the blood of patriots, the earth should 
have yawned and swallowed him up." 
(Applause and hisses, with cries of " Take 
that back! ") The uproar became so great 
that for a time no one could be heard. At 
length the Hon. William Sturgis came to 
Mr. Phillips's side at the front of the plat- 
form. He was met with cries of " Phillips 
or nobody," " Make him take back rec- 
reant; he shan't go on till he takes it 
back." When it was understood that Mr. 
Sturgis meant to sustain, not to interrupt 
Mr. Phillips, he was listened to and said, 
" I did not come here to take part in this 
discussion, nor do I intend to; but I do en- 
treat you, fellow-citizens, by ever)^hing you 
hold sacred, — I conjure you by every asso« 
ciation connected with this Hall, consecrated 
by our Fathers to freedom of discussion, — 
that you listen to every man who addresses 
you in a decorous manner." Phillips re- 
sumed his speech and made in this, his de- 
but, one of the best remembered triumphs in 
a life of oratory. His speech, though im- 
perfectly reported, is one of those historic 
speeches which carry their eloquence to the 

\%2. 



I 



THE CRISIS 

reader, even through the disguise of print. 
When Phillips was asked afterwards what 
his thoughts were during the delivery of it, 
he said he was thinking of nothing except 
the carrying of resolutions. This he ac- 
complished and the vote of the meeting was 
cast for freedom : the murderers of Love- 
joy were denounced. 

The practical importance of this outcome 
to the Abolitionists is brought home to us 
in a letter written by one of them, a woman, 
to a friend in England. " Stout men, my 
husband for instance, came home that day 
and lifted up their voices and wept. Dr. 
Channing did not know how dangerous an 
experiment, as people count danger, he ad- 
ventured. We knew that we must send 
our children out of town and sleep in our 
day garments that night, unless free dis- 
cussion prevailed." 

The burning of Pennsylvania Hall, in 
Philadelphia, in May, 1838, was among the 
last of the outrages committed during this 
epoch of persecution. There seems after 
this to have been a simmering down of the 
antagonism of the public to the Abolition- 
ists, and it was not until 1850 that another 
great attempt, the last attempt, was made 
by the united South to control the destinies 
of the North. 

133 



VI 

RETROSPECT AND 
PROSPECT 

It seems to be always the case in human af- 
fairs that conditions grow better and worse 
at the same time. An evil reaches its cli- 
max at the very moment that the corrective 
reform is making a hidden march upon it 
from an unexpected quarter. And so this 
epoch of crisis in mob violence against Ab- 
olition must be recorded as the epoch during 
which Abolition passed from the stage of 
moral agitation into the arena of practical 
politics. The Anti-slavery men had begun 
by heckling the clergy; they divided up the 
country into districts and sent their dreaded 
emissaries with lists of questions which the 
parsons had to answer. This process rent 
the churches, or rather it revealed the fact 
that the churches were Pro-slavery. In like 
manner the questioning of all candidates for 
office was taken up by the Abolitionists. 
In the year 1840 there were two thousand 
Anti-slavery Societies with a membership of 
134 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

two hundred thousand. It is apparent that 
the poHtical parties at the North were about 
to feel the same disruptive power run 
through their vitals that the churches had 
felt. 

If you take up a history of the United 
States, or the biography of a statesman of 
this time, you will find that the author only 
begins to deal with Abolition in about the 
year 1840, that is, after it has reached the 
political stage. He writes perhaps a few 
pages, as Mr. Rhodes does, about the rise 
of the movement, taking for granted that 
the reader knows how Abolition got started, 
and why it was able so soon to overshadow 
all other questions. The same thing occurs 
in the history of the rise of Christianity; 
with this difference, — that the early stages 
of Christianity are involved in obscurity; 
whereas the activities of the early years of 
Abolition are recorded in accessible and 
thrilling books. The historian, as a gen- 
eral rule, gives us only the history of 
politics. He seems not to be interested in 
the beginnings of things. And yet, those 
beginnings are the seed. The beginnings 
of any movement, — the epoch when it is in 
the stage of idea, of agitation, of moral im- 
pulse, and before it has assumed a shape 
135 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

that can be termed political, — these begin- 
, nings show its nature. In them you find 
/ the explanation of the later political stages. 

The history of the Anti-slavery struggle 
after 1840, — that is to say, the history of 
political Anti-slavery, — has been well an- 
alyzed and understood, and can be traced 
in the biographies of our statesmen. I am 
not going to retrace it in this essay; for I 
believe that Garrison's distinctive work was 
accomplished before 1840. I shall content 
myself with a few observations which apply 
to the whole period between 1830 and i860, 
and which are equally true of the agita- 
tional era and of the political era of the 
struggle. 

The spread of Anti-slavery sentiment 
was brought about through the doings of 
the Slave Power. From the time when the 
State of Georgia in 1830 offered a reward 
for the arrest of Garrison, till South Caro- 
lina seceded in i860, the education of the 
North was due to the activity of the South. 
While North and South were in ignorance 
of this fact, the form of the reaction and 
inter-action between Northern and South- 
ern elements was the inevitable form 
through which such a drama must pass. 
The Slave Power believed that Garrison, 
136 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

with some almost superhuman agency, was 
moving upon it to devour it. Slavery, dur- 
ing the whole course of its long suicide, 
was, in its own view, striving to save it- 
self from destruction. The Abolitionists 
brought into the conflict the element of 
Fate. The South knew that no form of 
com.promise could bind Garrison. It felt 
this with the instinct of the hunted animal. 
It aimed a blow at the enemy, Abolition; 
and it struck free speech, it struck the right 
of petition, trial by jury, education, benevo- 
lence, common sense. Slavery began its 
death agony in 1830, and was driven from 
one step to another merely as a consequence 
of the nature of man. If the South could 
have smiled at Abolition, if it could have 
kept its temper and lent no hand in assist- 
ing the Abolitionists to bring forvvard their 
cause, then the way of the reformers would 
have been hard. This would have hap- 
pened, perhaps, if Anti-slavery in America 
had been a pioneer cause, a new light lead- 
ing the world. But our Anti-slavery cause 
was a mere means of catching up with Eu- 
rope. The moral power of humanity at 
large prevented South Carolina from smil- 
ing at Abolition. The slave-owners trem- 
bled because they were a part of the thing 
137 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

which criticised them. Massachusetts and 
South CaroHna were parts of that modern 
world in which their heart-strings met. 
This soHdarity between the North and the 
South was the cause of the anguish, and the 
means of the cure. 

In the early days of any movement it is 
only the expert who can read the times cor- 
rectly. The lean prophet, in whose bosom 
the turmoil of a new age begins, sees proofs 
of that age everywhere. He thinks of 
nothing else, he cares for nothing else. 
Thus the Abolitionists could see in 1830 
what the average man could not understand 
till 1845, — that the Slave Power was a 
Moloch which controlled the politics of the 
North and which, in the nature of things, 
could stick at nothing while engaged in per- 
petuating that control. Garrison or May 
could perceive this in 1828 by taking an ob- 
servation of Edward Everett or of Daniel 
Webster. But the average citizen could 
not see it; he lacked the detachment. His 
obfuscation was a part of the problem, a 
part of the evil in the period. In 1845 it 
required the Annexation of Texas to show 
to the man in the street those same truths 
which the Abolitionists had seen so plainly 
fifteen years before. The Annexation of 
138 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

Texas was the most educational of all the 
convulsive demonstrations of the South. 

Where did the motive power reside from 
which all these changes proceeded? Was 
this motive power the conscience of the Ab- 
olitionists? I do not think so. The Abo- 
litionists stand nearer to a sense of justice, 
nearer to rational modern life than the rest 
of our compatriots of that time. But the 
Abolitionists were not the motive power; 
they were merely the point of entrance of 
new life into the community. Every 
stroke of his pulse, that told an Abolition- 
ist that something must be done about 
slavery, could perform its functions only 
by flashing down to Georgia, and coming 
back in the form of anger and of grief. 
Every argument that split a vestry, or left 
a mind ruined was necessary. It was es- 
sential that these things should come. 

The metaphysical question was always 
the same, namely : " How far legal argu- 
ment is valid when it contravenes human 
feelings ? " The question assumed various 
forms while the fire was eating its way 
through society towards the powder maga- 
zine; but the substance of it never varied. 
The whole age-long contest in all its Pro- 
tean forms is summarized in a well-known 
139 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

legal anecdote. Judge Harrington of Ver- 
mont is said to have told the attorney for 
a Southern owner who was seeking to re- 
cover a fugitive slave in 1808, that his " evi- 
dence of ownership " was insufficient. 
" What evidence does your Honor re- 
quire? " " Nothing less than a bill of sale 
from God Almighty." This story gives 
the two elements, pity and business inter- 
est, expressed in terms of constitutional ar- 
gument. It summarizes the labors of our 
statesmen, — Webster, Calhoun, Sumner, 
Taney, Douglas, Lincoln, — each of whom 
had his bout with the problem. The unfor- 
tunate American statesmen who were 
obliged to formulate a philosophy upon the 
matter seem to me like that procession of 
hypocrites in Dante's Purgatory, robed in 
mantles of lead. They emerge, each bent 
down with his weight of logic, blinded by 
his view of the inherited curse, — nursing 
his critique of the constitution; they file 
across the pages of our history from Jef- 
ferson to Lincoln, — sad, perplexed men. 

The solution given by Garrison to the 
puzzle was that the law must give way, that 
the Constitution was of no importance, 
after all. This is what any American 
would have answered had the question con- 
140 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

cerned the Constitution of Switzerland or 
of Patagonia. But, for some reason, our 
own Constitution was regarded differently. 
I suppose that the politics, theology, and 
formal organization of the whole world are 
never so important as they pretend to be. 
The element of material interest in these 
matters gives them their awful weight to 
contemporaries. When we are dealing with 
a past age this element evaporates, and w^e 
see clearly that most of the importances of 
the world have no claim to our reverence. 
Now when a man has felt in this way about 
his own age, we call him a great man; be- 
cause w^e agree with him. For this is the 
test, and the only conceivable test of great- 
ness, — that a man shall look upon his own 
age, and see it in the same light as that in 
which posterity sees it. We must concede 
greatness to Garrison. His early editorials 
upon the question of disunion show that he 
viewed our Constitution in true historical 
perspective as early as 1832. 

Let us now remember some of the phases 
of the nightmare which, like a continuous 
Dreyfus case, perplexed all honest men, all 
thinking men in America for two genera- 
tions. The Constitution was so inwoven 
with our social life that the conflict be- 
141 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

tween the letter and the spirit was ubiqui- 
tous. The restless probings went forward at 
the fireside, in the club, in the shop ; no pil- 
low was free from them. Slavery covered 
every sentiment with a cloak. Slavery was 
in literature, in religion, in custom. This 
social, daily, domestic, discussion and heart- 
burn was the true means of regeneration. 
The political history of slavery was to* he 
the outcome of this fireside discussion. 
The constitutional theory which any man 
held was, in this epoch, the outcome of his 
personal struggle with evil. In other 
words the slavery question had become the 
symbol of the relation between good and 
evil in practical life. We notice in all this 
the tardiness of the political world in ab- 
sorbing new ideas. The world of politics 
is always twenty years behind the world of 
thought. The world of politics lives and 
works in ideals which are twenty years old. 
The result of all the upturnings of con- 
science, which went forward in millions of 
private breasts, was at length seen in the 
formation of the Republican Party. By 
the time that party was formed one could 
distinguish (as Mr. Rhodes points out), 
two classes of men among its members : — 
the men actuated by pity for the slave, of 
142 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

whom Sumner was the type; and the men 
actuated by resentment at being ruled from 
the South, of whom Seward was the type. 
It was, however, the Abohtion tom-tom that 
had called both classes from the deep; and 
the Seward class was but an imperfect, 
half-awakened example of the true thing. 
The Seward class could never stand fire. 
Its rourage, — for the infusion of courage 
was the sole function of that tom-tom, — its 
courage was in the head and not, as yet, in 
the vitals. This class was subject to splen- 
did visitations of new idea; and yet it was 
also subject to the occasional panic-stricken 
discovery that the bottom had dropped out 
after all, and that one must go softly, be- 
cause life could npt be trusted. 

The abstract, inscrutable nature of the 
contest between Freedom and Slavery first 
began to be revealed to the politicians in 
about 1850; and men then began to feel that 
the whole historic sequence of things was 
a fate-drama. Even then, everybody in 
politics was afraid to speak plainly about 
slavery. It required, for instance, notable 
insight as well as great political courage 
for Lincoln to state what was known to 
everyone. In 1858 he took his political 
life in his hands, and spoke of " the house 
143 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

divided against itself." His associates 
were scandalized by his rashness, and 
begged him to omit the phrase. Merciful 
heavens! Had not this house been di- 
vided against itself for three-quarters of a 
century? Yes, truly, this w^hole matter 
was a fate-drama, and in a deeper sense 
than Seward imagined or than even Lin- 
coln could guess. Seward with his percep- 
tion of the " irrepressible conflict between 
opposing and enduring forces," and Lincoln 
with his vision of the blood of white men, 
drawn by the sword, which should repay 
the blood of slaves that had been drawn by 
the lash, — saw only the main crash of the 
drama. The reality of it was profounder, 
and the trailing consequences of it were to 
be more terrible than they suspected. 

The intellectual and moral heritages of 
slavery are with us still. The timidity of 
our public life and of our private conversa- 
tion is a tradition from those times, which 
fifty years of freedom have not sufficed to 
efface. The morbid sensitiveness of the 
American to new political ideas has been a 
mystery to Europe. We cannot bear to 
hear a proposition plainly put ; — or let me 
say, we are only recently beginning to cast 
off our hothouse condition, and to bear the 
144 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

sun and wind of the natural world. I do 
not know anything which measures the 
timidity of the American nation better than 
the moderation of Lincoln's speeches, a 
moderation which he was obliged to adopt 
in order to be listened to. He was always 
in danger of showing his heart; he must 
avoid the taint of Abolition, the suspicion 
of any attack upon the Constitution. He 
must step gingerly and remember what part 
of the State of Illinois he is in at the mo- 
ment. Even when the war breaks out Lin- 
coln is obliged to invent a way of looking 
at that war which shall place the Union 
cause in a popular light. He is obliged to 
pretend that the war is not primarily about 
slavery at all. He is obliged to speak about 
the war in such a way as would be incom- 
prehensible to any one who is not a close 
student of our conditions. He must re- 
member the Border States. 

Here was a war over slavery which had 
been visibly brewing for more than a life- 
time. The Anti-slavery party comes into 
power; the Slave States revolt and the 
question is whether the Government shall 
prosecute a war and extinguish slavery, — ' 
or not. This is the way in which the edu- 
cated foreigner viewed the matter, and he 
145 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

was right. There were, however, in the 
Northern and Border States, many educated 
Americans who had from their cradles been 
taught to regard slavery as a thing almost 
sacred, — a thing which could not rightfully 
become a cause of war between the States. 
Therefore great caution had to be used in 
making any popular statement of the mat- 
ter. This war must be looked upon as a 
war, not about Slavery but about Union. 
Lincoln was thus obliged to befog his State 
papers with such careful statements as to 
his being for the Union without slavery, or 
for the Union with slavery, that the out- 
sider really began to doubt whether, per- 
haps, Lincoln meant that slavery might be 
retained in the end. Even in this crisis no 
one in political life was allowed to speak 
in plain terms. To do so was regarded as 
most unwise. The misguided and half- 
minded man of America had been trained 
to believe that Slavery was sacred; but 
for the Union he will die. So long as 
you call it Union he is ready to die for 
humanity. 

Lincoln, then, during the years of his 
leadership was obliged to stoop to the com- 
plex, peculiar, and inferior character of the 
contemporary mind. He was one of the 
146 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

greatest political geniuses and one of the 
most beautiful characters that ever lived; 
and he managed somehow to be intellectu- 
ally honest and very nearly frank while ful- 
filling his mission. Yet I can never read 
his debates with Douglas or consider his 
Border-State policy without being struck 
by the technical nature of all our history. 
One of Lincoln's chief interests in life, from 
early manhood onward, lay in emancipa- 
tion. This he could not say and remain in 
politics; nay, he could not think it and re- 
main in politics. He could not quite know 
himself and yet remain in politics. The 
awful weight of a creed that was never 
quite true, — the creed of the Constitution, 
• — pressed down upon the Intellects of our 
public men. This was the dower and curse 
of slavery. 

The value of the epoch during which 
the curse was cast off is that, in 
reading about it, we can see thought move, 
and can find ourselves In sympathy wnth all 
shades of reform. Let us take an example 
at random, as one might take a drop of 
water for a sample of the ocean. In the 
dawn of the Abolition movement its ad- 
herents in New York State, who were re- 
sponsible, educated and propertied persons, 
147 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

were a little afraid of the Garrisonians of 
Boston. The principles of the New York 
group are well stated by William Jay in 
the first number of the Emancipator, and 
are in striking contrast to the declarations 
of Garrison in the first number of the Lib- 
erator, which I have quoted on a previous 
page. Jay writes: 

" The duty and policy of immediate 
emancipation, although clear to us, are not 
so to multitudes of people who abhor 
slavery and sincerely wish its removal. 
They take it for granted, no matter why 
or wherefore, that if the slaves were now 
liberated they would instantly cut the 
throats and fire the dwellings of their ben- 
efactors. Hence these good people look 
upon the advocates of emancipation as a 
set of dangerous fanatics, who are jeop- 
ardizing the peace of the Southern States 
and riveting the fetters of the slaves by the 
very attempt to break them. In their opin- 
ion the slaves are not fit for freedom, and 
therefore it is necessary to wait patiently 
till they are. Now, unless these patient 
waiters can be brought over to our side, 
emancipation is hopeless ; for, first, they are 
an immense majority of all among us who 
are hostile to slavery; and, secondly, they 
148 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

are as conscientious in their opinions as we 
are in ours, and unless converted will op- 
pose and defeat all our efforts. But how 
are they to be converted? Only by the ex- 
hibition of Truth. The moral, social, and 
political evils of slavery are but imperfectly 
known and considered. These should be 
portrayed in strong but true colors, and it 
would not be difficult to prove that, how- 
ever inconvenient and dangerous emanci- 
pation may be, the continuance of slavery 
must be infinitely more inconvenient and 
dangerous. 

** Constitutional restrictions, independent 
of other considerations, forbid all other 
than moral interference with slavery in the 
Southern States. But we have as good and 
perfect a right to exhort slaveholders to 
liberate their slaves as we have to exhort 
them to practice any virtue or avoid any 
vice. Nay, we have not only the right, but 
under certain circumstances it may be our 
duty to give such advice ; and while we con- 
fine ourselves within the boundaries of right 
and duty, we may and ought to disregard 
the threats and denunciations by which we 
may be assailed. 

" The question of slavery in the District 
of Columbia is totally distinct, as far as we 
149 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

are concerned, from that of slavery in the 
Southern States. 

" As a member of Congress, I should 
think myself no more authorized to legis- 
late for the slaves in Virginia than for the 
serfs of Russia. But Congress has full 
authority to abolish slavery in the District, 
and I think it to be its duty to do so. The 
public need information respecting the 
abominations committed at Washington 
v^ith the sanction of their Representatives 
— abominations which will cease whenever 
those Representatives please. If this sub- 
ject is fully and ably pressed upon the at- 
tention of our electors, they may perhaps 
be induced to require pledges from candi- 
dates for Congress for their votes for the 
removal of this foul stain from our National 
Government. As to the Colonization So- 
ciety, it is neither a wicked conspiracy upon 
the one hand nor a panacea for slavery on 
the other. Many good and wise men be- 
long to it and believe in its efficacy." 

These New York men are in a more ra- 
tional state of mind than Garrison was. 
When in 1833 Samuel J. May begged Wil- 
liam Jay to join in forming a national An- 
ti-slavery Society, Jay paused. I suppose 
he had been reading the Liberator. He de- 
150 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

dined to join, on the ground that the local 
Societies could do the work as well for the 
time being, and that the great objection to 
Anti-slavery Societies v/as that they aimed 
at unconstitutional interference with 
slavery. He suggested that if a National 
Society was to be formed, it should show, 
by its constitution, that the objects were le- 
gal, that is to say, it should acknowledge the 
exclusive rights of the Southern States to 
settle the matter of slavery within their own 
boundaries, and claim only the right to urge 
Congress to abolish slavery in the District 
of Columbia, and the territories. 

The new Society did, in fact, adopt care- 
fully drawn provisions expressive of Jay's 
idea, and Mr. Tuckerman, in his memoir 
of Jay, comments upon the circumstance as 
follows : " Looked at by the light of sub- 
sequent events, the importance of placing 
Anti-slavery upon a Constitutional basis 
cannot be over-rated. Upon the principles 
thus distinctly avowed rested the moral and 
political strength of the movement during 
the struggle of thirty years." It is impos- 
sible not to feel the truth of this reflection. 
The average American mind could only 
deal with the slavery matter when presented 
in legal form. Mr. Garrison, in spite of 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

his denunciation of the Union, felt the force 
of this appeal to law and order. He actu- 
ally signed the declarations of the new So- 
ciety, which put the movement on a con- 
servative basis, and he wrote editorially in 
the Liberator as follows : " Abolitionists as 
clearly understand and as sacredly regard 
the Constitutional powers of Congress as 
do their traducers, and they know and have 
again and again asserted that Congress has 
no more rightful authority to sit in judg- 
ment upon Southern slavery than it has to 
legislate upon the abolition of slavery in 
the French colonies." This editorial is en- 
tirely out of key with Mr. Garrison's fun- 
damental beliefs, as we shall see later. We 
have to remember, in reviewing any con- 
vulsive epoch in history, how frequently 
men, even great men, have been jolted for- 
ward and back between conflicting points of 
view. Garrison was subject to these re- 
vulsions, and was totally unconscious of his 
inconsistencies. 

The point I would here make is that all 
these various and contradictory dogmas 
were necessary. Each one was an inev- 
itable progression, going on in somebody's 
mind, and each helped to move the argu- 
ment along. It is easy to see that the atti- 
152 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

tude of Jay in recommending legal action 
only, and the attitude of Garrison in de- 
nouncing the Constitution, as he did most 
of the time, were both of them necessary 
to the working out of the problem. 

There was another element of complica- 
tion which assisted in disintegrating the 
Anti-slavery cause. As time went on 
Garrison kept confiding his new de- 
velopments and changes in opinion 
to the columns of the Liberator, His 
views upon Peace, No-government, Wom- 
an's Rights, Non-resistance, as they formed 
themselves within him, were advocated 
with an incredible volubility which dis- 
quieted many other Abolitionists. After 
one or two attempts at schism, the more 
conservative Abolitionists formed a new 
Society which went by the name of the 
New Organization. With whom shall we 
sympathize among all these contending 
sects? Manifestly with them all. Let us 
examine the case of Woman's Rights. 
Women had been working in the Massa- 
chusetts Society and in the National So- 
ciety from the beginning. Women were 
among the ablest, the most effective, the 
most saintly, the most distinguished, of the 
workers in the Abolition cause. Should 
153 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

they be admitted to equal fellowship or not? 
Manifestly they must be so admitted. Yet 
to do this identified the cause of Abolition 
with the theory of Woman's Rights, a con- 
clusion most repugnant to many excellent 
Anti-slavery people. There must follow, 
then, a multiplication of sects; this was one 
of the logical necessities of the situation. 

Now there was no person in the Aboli- 
tion camp who understood these matters 
from a philosophic point of view. The 
New Organizationists were struggling to 
keep the cause pure, to keep it from being 
mixed up with other causes and ideas, such 
as Woman's Rights, Non-resistance, etc. 
Garrison was also struggling to keep the 
cause pure; to prevent it from being di- 
luted, and from falling into the hands of 
sectarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. 
In 1840 we find the Garrisonians chartering 
a steamboat, and taking several hundred 
men and women from Massachusetts, in 
order to " carry " the annual meeting in New 
York City for his ideas. Jay seems to have 
understood that the confusion was past cure, 
though he did not quite perceive that it 
was inevitable. His personal course was to 
resign from the Anti-slavery organizations 
when they veered away from Constitutional 
154 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

methods. He again became a free lance. 
In 1846 he writes: "Our Anti-slavery So- 
cieties are for the most part virtually de- 
funct. Anti-slavery Conventions are what- 
ever the leaders present happen to be ; some- 
times disgustingly irreligious, and very 
often Jacobinical and disorganizing; and 
frequently proscriptive of such of their 
brethren who will not consent to render 
Abolition a mere instrument for effecting 
certain political changes having no relation 
whatever to slavery." 

Now let us take one step further and 
note this : — that at the time of the An- 
nexation of Texas, Jay had arrived at Gar- 
rison's views as to the necessity of breaking 
up the Union. " Should the slaveholders 
succeed," says Jay, '' in their design of an- 
nexing Texas, then indeed would I not 
merely discuss, but with all my powers 
would I advocate an immediate dissolution. 
I love my children, my friends, my country 
too well to leave them the prey to the ac- 
cursed Government which would be sure 
to follow." And again : " A separation will 
be more easily effected now than when the 
relative strength of the South shall have 
been greatly augmented. Hereafter we 
shall be as serfs rebelling against their 
155 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

bonds. Now, if the North pleases, we may 
dissolve the Union without spilling a drop 
of blood/' 

It is impossible not to sympathize with 
the state of mind revealed in these last sen- 
tences, — a state of mind to which Jay has 
been brought by the march of events. The 
truth is that the whole vast problem was 
constantly moving forward. Not only 
Garrison and Jay, but every soul who lived 
in America during these years held fluctuat- 
ing views about the matter of slavery; and 
the complex controversy moved forward 
like a glacier, cracking and bending and 
groaning, and marking the everlasting rocks 
as it progressed. In the end, we come to 
see that the whole struggle was a solid 
struggle, an ever-changing Unity, an or- 
chestra in which all the various instruments 
were interdependent and responsive to one 
another. We see also that each individual 
then living was somehow a little microcosm 
which reflected and had relations with the 
whole moving miracle; and that every ele- 
ment of the great universe was represented 
in him. We can perceive plainly, to-day, 
how necessary it was that each error should 
be made ; that Garrison should issue his in- 
consecutive fulminations of dogma, and 
156 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

that Jay should retire in gloom, when the 
cause entered politics. We see how inev- 
itable it was that the cause should be be- 
trayed and polluted, soiled and kneaded into 
the mire of the world, woven into the web 
of American life. Gradually the leaven 
was invading and qualifying the whole 
lump. 



157 



VII 

THE MAN OF ACTION 

In calling up the spirit of Garrison out of 
the irrecoverable past we must never for- 
get that he was but a part of something; — 
we must call up the whole epoch. Garrison 
was as much an outcome of slavery as was 
" Uncle Tom's Cabin " or John C. Calhoun. 
He is a spiritual product; he is that sup- 
pressed part of man's nature, which could 
not co-exist with slavery. He is like a 
fiery salamander, who should emerge dur- 
ing a glacial epoch, — crawling out from a 
volcano that was all the time hidden beneath 
the ice-crust. It is through the hot breath 
of this salamander that verdure is to be 
brought back to the earth, and the benign 
climate of modern life restored to America. 
To the conservative minds of his own time 
he appeared to be a monster; and he was a 
monster, — a monster of virtue, a monster 
of love, a monster of power. 

Let us not judge but only examine him. 
Fortunately the materials are abundant, the 
158 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

record is complete. His life in four enor- 
mous volumes has been written by his chil- 
dren; and the children of Garrison sup- 
press nothing. We are brought into ab- 
solute contact with all of Garrison's singu- 
larities. This biography is not a critical 
work : it is, one might say, a work of idol- 
atry. Every little battle is fought over 
again, and every word or gesture of the 
protagonist is deemed sacred. The reader 
feels oppressed by the one-sidedness of this 
procedure. One becomes sorry for the 
other actors in the great drama: for 
after all, these men could not help 
it that ^Hhey were not Garrison; they 
seem ^b live out their lives under 
the pitiful inferiority of not being Garri- 
son. For instance, Cassius M. Clay of 
Kentucky went to Yale College, and was, 
as a youth, converted to Anti-slavery by a 
lecture of Garrison's at New Haven. Clay 
returned to Kentucky, emancipated his 
slaves, and thereafter made relentless war 
on slavery, thus furnishing, say Garrison's 
biographers, " an example without parallel 
both of heroism and of the folly of attempt- 
ing to undermine the slave power from 
within/' The italics are mine. But why 
do Garrison's children think it folly for a 
159 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Southerner to agitate against slavery in 
Kentucky? It seems to me that to do so 
was right. I believe that the agitation of 
Clay in Kentucky somehow went to a spot 
in the slavery question that nothing else 
could have reached. It affected Garrison 
himself as nothing else ever affected him : it 
softened him. It was the conduct of Clay 
and Rankin (another Southerner) which 
caused Garrison to offer a resolution at the 
Cincinnati convention in 1853, i^ which 
he stated that the Abolitionists of the coun- 
try were as much interested in the welfare 
of the slaveholders as they were in the ele- 
vation of the slaves. His habiturij attitude 
towards the slaveholders had always been, 
" We do not acknowledge them to be 
within the pale of Christianity, of Repub- 
licanism, of humanity. This we say dis- 
passionately, and not for the sake of using 
strong language.'* 

Garrison, then, was touched by the almost 
miraculous courage of Clay. If there had 
been a few more such Southern Abolition- 
ists, the bitterness of this whole epoch might 
have been qualified. It was, however, one of 
the stock taunts made against Garrison that 
he did not go South to agitate; and, there- 
fore, these biographers reason that any agita- 
160 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

tion of slavery in the South must be '' folly." 
The four great volumes contain frequent 
little hacks and side-cuts out of old contro- 
versies which are wearying to the modern 
reader. Nevertheless, the volumes contain 
also such mountains of precious ore, such a 
painstaking recovery of everything germane 
to the subject, such an angel-minded pres- 
entation of the blind side of Garrison, with 
the record of things said against him, — 
that the reader is left with nothing but 
gratitude to these children who are so like 
the father that their very deficiencies, 
rightly taken, illuminate their subject. The 
children Cvi Garrison have not written a phil- 
osophic history.* But there are other things 
in the world besides criticism, and some 
things more rare and more beautiful than the 
critical intellect. There is praise and wor- 
ship ; there is reverence and love ; there is the 
girasole that turns towards the sun and fol- 
lows him from the orient to his setting, 

* "Writing not without bias, surely, but in a spirit 
emulous of the absolute fairness which distinguished 
our father, we have done little more than coordinate 
materials to serve posterity in forming that judgment 
of him which we have no desire to forestall. In a 
literary point of view, we have aimed at nothing 
more than clearness, sequence and proportion." — Life 
of G. Preface xii. 

i6i 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ever in a dream, ever without knowing that 
he has changed his position, because for her 
he has not moved or changed; to her he is 
only himself. 

Garrison was a man of action, that is to 
say, a man to whom ideas were revealed in 
relation to passing events, and who saw in 
ideas the levers and weapons with which he 
might act upon the world. A seer on the 
other hand is a man who views passing 
events by the light of ideas, and who 
counts upon his vision, not upon his action, 
for influence. The seer feels that the mere 
utterance of his thought, nay the mere 
vision of it, fulfills his function. Garrison 
was not a man of this kind. His mission 
was more lowly, more popular, more vis- 
ible; and his intellectual grasp was re- 
stricted and uncertain. Garrison was a 
man of the market-place. Language to 
him was not the mere means of stating 
truth, but a mace to break open a jail. He 
was to be the instrument of great and rapid 
changes in public opinion during an epoch 
of terrible and fluctuating excitement. The 
thing which he is to see, to say, and to pro- 
claim, from moment to moment, is as 
freshly given to him by prodigal nature, is 
as truly spontaneous, as the song of the 
162 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

thrush. He never calculates, he acts upon 
inspiration; he is always ingenuous, inno- 
cent, self-poised, id, as it were, inside of 
some self-acting machinery which controls 
his course, and rolls out the carpet of his 
life for him to walk on. We must remem- 
ber this; for it is almost impossible not to 
use words which imply the contrary in de- 
scribing the acts of the practical man, — the 
man who utters sharp sayings in order to 
gain attention, the man who gives no quar- 
ter when in the ring. 

In reviewing the life of such a man we 
must take the logic of it as a whole; we 
must feel the unity of it as an organic proc- 
ess and torrent of force. It will contain 
many breaks in, metaphysical unity; yet 
through these breaks may be seen the gush- 
ing stream of the spirit. I believe that Gar- 
rison shifted his ground and changed his 
mind less often than most men of that 
kaleidoscopic epoch. But we must not try 
to make him out more consistent than he 
was. All politics, including reform agita- 
tion, proceeds from day to day and from 
year to year under the illusion that the 
thing in hand is more important than it 
really is. All the actors are at every mo- 
ment somewhat deceived; and to each of 
163 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

them the thing in hand ever a little blots 
out the sky. The agitator lives in a realm 
of exaggeration, of broadsides and italic 
types, of stampings of the foot and clench- 
ings of the hand. He uses the terms and 
phrases of immortal truth to clamp together 
his leaky raft. The " belle response " of 
the martyr, the deep apothegm of the sage, 
and the words of Christ, are ever on his 
lips. Such things pass muster in politics 
v^ithout exciting comment. And yet, these 
statements of ideal truth, like the axioms of 
arithmetic, never quite square with the ma- 
terial world. They can only be felt and be- 
lieved in mentally. You can never find or 
measure out an exact pound of anything or 
lay off a true mile; nor can you assign any 
accurate value to the influence of a good 
deed. Nevertheless, the inaccuracy which 
is permissible in the market-place is very 
much greater than the inaccuracy permissi- 
ble to the historian who sits in his closet 
endeavoring to think clearly upon the mat- 
ter. 

The source of Garrison's power was the 
Bible. From his earliest days he read the 
Bible constantly, and prayed constantly. It 
was with this fire that he started his con- 
flagration. Now the Bible is many things. 
164 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

It is a key to metaphysical truth, it is a 
compendium of large human wisdom, it is 
a code of ethics, it is the history of a race, 
and many other things beside. To Garri- 
son, the Bible was the many-piped organ to 
which he sang the song of his life, and the 
arsenal from which he drew the weapons 
of his warfare. I doubt if any man ever 
knew the Bible so well, or could produce a 
text to fit a political emergency with such 
startling felicity as Garrison. Take for 
example, the text provided by him for Wen- 
dell Phillips's speech on the Sunday morn- 
ing following Lincoln's call for troops in 
1861. " Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye 
have not hearkened unto me in proclaiming 
liberty everyone to his brother, and every 
man to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim a 
liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, 
to the pestilence, and to the famine." 

I doubt whether Cromwell or Milton 
could have rivaled Garrison in this field of 
quotation; and the power of quotation is as 
dreadful a weapon as any which the human 
intellect can forge. From his boyhood up- 
ward Garrison's mind was soaked in the 
Bible and in no other book. His " Causes " 
are all drawn from the Bible, and most of 
them may be traced to the phrases and 
165 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

thoughts of Christ, as for instance Peace 
(Peace I give unto you), Perfectionism 
(Be ye therefore perfect), Non-resistance 
(Resist not evil), Anti-sabbatarianism 
(The Lord is Lord of the Sabbath). So 
also, a prejudice against all fixed forms of 
worship, against the authority of human 
government, against every binding of the 
spirit into conformity with human law, — 
all these things grew up in Garrison's mind 
out of his Bible reading; as they have done 
in the minds of so many other men before 
and after him. He, himself, was not going 
to be bound, and never was bound, by any 
declaration nor by any document. He even 
arrived at distrusting the Bible itself, per- 
ceiving that the Bible itself was often a 
tyrant, — much as Christ saw the tyranny of 
the law of Moses. All this part of Garri- 
son's mental activity is his true vocation. 
Here he rages like a lion of Judah. By 
these onslaughts he is freeing people from 
their mental bonds : he is shaking down the 
palaces of Babylon. 

His age was the age of social experi- 
ments, and he was ever ready to take on a 
new one. This hospitality to new dogmas 
annoyed his associates, and led, as we have 
seen, to revolts, schisms, and heresies in 
i66 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

the Anti-slavery ranks. Garrison seems to 
have been assailed by such multitudinous 
revelations from on high that he was 
obliged to publish one dispensation in order 
to clear the wires for the next. There is 
one of these manifestoes which reveals the 
impromptu character of them all. " De- 
spite its length," say the biographers, " the 
greater part of this important document 
must be given here." There follow several 
pages of fine print, concerning the causes 
uppermost in Garrison's mind, which evi- 
dently had filled up all the space in the Liber- 
ator, or used up all the ink in the office ; and 
yet it appears at the close, that Garrison has 
forgotton to say anything about woman's 
rights. And so he calls out, like a man 
upon a departing stage-coach : " As our ob- 
ject is universal emancipation to redeem 
women as Well as men from a servile to an 
equal condition, — we shall go for the 
RIGHTS OF WOMEN to their utmost extent." 
In those days societies were founded for 
everything. No one ever paused to con- 
sider what things could or could not be 
accomplished through organization, nor 
how far the sayings of Christ were parts of 
one another, nor whether at the bottom of 
all these questions there lay some truth 
167 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

which enveloped them all. Every one 
rushed to utterance, and Garrison more than 
all men put together. So long as v^e con- 
sider his utterances in the large, as part of 
the upturning of that age, as the sine qua 
non of a new epoch, we love and value 
them. It is only when we collocate them, 
analyze them, and try to find something for 
our own souls in them, that they turn out 
to be emergency cries. They were de- 
signed towards local ends, they were prac- 
tical politics, they do not always cohere 
with one another. 

The great thesis to which he devoted his 
life, however, was unquestionably sound. 
He thus announced it in the Liberator in 
1832: 

" There is much declamation about the 
sacredness of the compact which was 
formed between the free and slave States, 
on the adoption of the Constitution. A 
sacred compact, forsooth! We pronounce 
it the most bloody and heaven-daring ar- 
rangement ever made by men for the con- 
tinuance and protection of a system of the 
most atrocious villainy ever exhibited upon 
the earth. Yes, we recognize the compact, 
but with feelings of shame and indignation; 
and it will be held in everlasting infamy by 
168 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

the friends of justice and humanity 
throughout the world. It was a compact 
formed at the sacrifice of the bodies and 
souls of millions of our race, for the sake 
of achieving a political object — an un- 
blushing and monstrous coalition to do evil 
that good might come. Such a compact 
was in the nature of things, and according 
to the law of God, null and void from the 
beginning. No body of men ever had the 
right to guarantee the holding of human be- 
ings in bondage. 

" Who or what were the framers of our 
Government that they should dare confirm 
and authorize such high-handed villainy — 
such a flagrant robbery of the inalienable 
rights of man — such a glaring violation of 
all the precepts and injunctions of the Gos- 
pel — such a savage war upon a sixth part 
of our whole population? They were men, 
like ourselves — as fallible, as sinful, as 
weak, as ourselves. By the infamous bar- 
gain which they made between themselves, 
they virtually dethroned the Most High 
God, and trampled beneath their feet their 
own solemn and heaven-attested Declara- 
tion, that all men are created equal, and en- 
dowed by their Creator with certain in- 
alienable rights — among which are life, 
169 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They 
had no lawful power to bind themselves or 
their posterity for one hour — for one mo- 
ment — by ^lich an unholy alliance. It was 
not valid then — it is not valid now. Still 
they persisted in maintaining it — and still 
do their successors, the people of Mas- 
sachusetts, of New England, and of 
the twelve free States, persist in maintain- 
ing it. A sacred compact! a sacred 
compact! What, then, is wicked and igno- 
minious ? 

" It is said that if you agitate this ques- 
tion you will divide the Union. Believe it 
not; but should disunion follow, the fault 
will not be yours. You must perform your 
duty, faithfully, fearlessly and promptly, 
and leave the consequences to God: that 
duty clearly is, to cease from giving coun- 
tenance and protection to Southern kid- 
nappers. Let them separate, if they can mus- 
ter courage enough — and the liberation of 
their slaves is certain. Be assured that 
slavery will very speedily destroy this Union 
if it he let alone; but even if the Union can 
be preserved by treading upon the necks, 
spilling the blood, and destroying the souls 
of millions of your race, we say it is not 
worth a price like this, and that it is in the 
170 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

highest degree criminal for you to continue 
the present compact. Let the pillars 
thereof fall — let the superstructure crum- 
ble into dust — if it must be upheld by rob- 
bery and oppression/' 

This statement of Garrison's is, to my 
mind, the best thing ever said about slavery 
in the United States. There is no exag- 
geration in the statement: it is absolutely 
true. It is a complete answer to the Con- 
stitutional point; and makes all our ante- 
bellum public men (including Lincoln) ap- 
pear a little benighted. They are like men 
w^ho have been born in a darkness and have 
lived always in a twilight. They all have 
a slight, congenital weakness of the eye, 
which prevents them from taking the day- 
light view of this whole matter. 

We ourselves to-day are so habituated to 
the historic obfuscation of our ancestors 
that we make allowance for it, — more al- 
lowance, indeed, than we ought to make. 
We have, by inheritance, rather weak eyes 
on this subject ourselves. The true cause 
for wonder as to the age of Abolition is 
not that Garrison was right, but that there 
should have been only one person in Amer- 
ica with a clear head. Let us now turn 
forward over ten years of history, — in- 
171 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

eluding all the pictures of struggle and in- 
cidents referred to in the earlier pages, and 
let us read Garrison's most famous exposi- 
tion of his theme uttered in 1842 : 

" We affirm that the Union is not of 
heaven. It is founded in unrighteousness 
and cemented with blood. It is the work 
of men's hands, and they worship the idol 
which they have made. It is a horrible 
mockery of freedom. In all its parts and 
proportions it is misshapen, incongruous, un- 
natural. The message of the prophet to the 
people in Jerusalem describes the exact char- 
acter of our * republican ' Compact : * Hear 
the Word of the Lord, ye scornful men that 
rule this people. Because ye have said, We 
have made a covenant with Death, and with 
Hell are we at agreement; when the over- 
flowing scourge shall pass through, it shall 
not come unto us : for we have made lies our 
refuge, and under falsehood have we hid 
ourselves: Therefore thus saith the Lord 
God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and 
righteousness to the plummet: and the hail 
shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the 
water shall overflow the hiding-place. And 
your covenant with Death shall he annulled, 
and your agreement with Hell shall not 
stand; when the overflowing scourge shall 
172 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

pass through then ye shall be trodden down 
by it.' 

" Another message of the same inspired 
prophet is equally applicable : ' Thus saith 
the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despised 
this word, and trust in oppression and per- 
verseness, and stay thereon : Therefore, this 
iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to 
fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose 
breaking cometh suddenly, at an instant. 
And he shall break it as the breaking of a 
potter's vessel that is broken to pieces; he 
shall not spare : so that there shall not be 
found in the bursting of it, a shred to take 
fire from the hearth, or to take water withal 
out of the pit.' 

" Slavery is a combination of Death and 
Hell, and with it the North have made a 
covenant and are at agreement. As an ele- 
ment of the Government it is omnipotent, 
omniscient, omnipresent. As a component 
part of the Union it is necessarily a national 
interest. Divorced from Northern protec- 
tion it dies ; with that protection, it enlarges 
its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and 
extends its ravages." 

These passages are too direct to be called 
extravagant. They are appalling. They 
are magnificent. And they came much 
173 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

nearer to expressing the general opinion of 
the country in 1842 than the milder words 
quoted above came to expressing the con- 
temporary opinion of 1832. Education was 
marching, the case was beginning to be un- 
derstood. Within three years after Garri- 
son's denunciation of the Constitution as an 
agreement with Hell, the Annexation of 
Texas brought thousands of the most con- 
servative minds in the country, including 
Channing, to the point of abandoning the 
Constitution; and when in 1854 Garrison 
publicly burned the Constitution on the 
Fourth of July, the incident was of slight 
importance. Civil War was already inevi- 
table: the dragon's teeth had been sown: 
the blades of bright bayonets could be seen 
pushing up through the soil in Kansas. 

We see, then, the profound unity of Garri- 
son's whole course, and may examine with 
indulgence some minor failures in logic 
which are very characteristic of him, — very 
characteristic, indeed, of all practical-minded 
men who, after making one fault of logic, 
proceed to joggle themselves back again to 
their true work by committing a second. 
It is apparent that a man who assumes Gar- 
rison's grounds as to the importance of the 
spirit, and the unimportance of everything 
174 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

else, can never turn aside and adopt any 
institution, without doing violence to his own 
principles. To disparage all government 
because it is " the letter that killeth," and 
thereafter to swear fealty to some party, or 
adopt a symbol, or advise a friend to vote 
with the Whigs is inconsistent. One who 
believes in standing for absolute principle 
can never indorse some political scheme on 
the ground that " this time it doesn't count." 
One who believes it wrong to meet force 
with force cannot retain the privilege of ap- 
proving some particular war or some par- 
ticular act of self-defense, which seems to 
him to be useful. Garrison had not the 
mental training to perceive this, and to do 
so would have involved his retirement from 
the camp to the closet: it would have in- 
volved his being someone else. Suffice it to 
say that from time to time his nature drew 
a veil over his theories, and so obscured 
them that he was able to support the Consti- 
tution of the United States, to rejoice in 
bloodshed, to take active part in political 
contests, — both in the great occasional Na- 
tional elections (as when he came out for 
Lincoln or Fremont), and in the continuous 
petty politics of the Anti-slavery cause. 
After having supported one of these hu- 
175 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

man institutions with zeal, and having justi- 
fied his conduct with facile and self-deceiv- 
ing casuistry, he would again ascend the 
mountain, the veil would be withdrawn from 
his intellect, and he would see his true vision 
once more and proclaim it with renewed fer- 
vor: the vision, namely, that no institution 
should be held sacred. 

Let us now look upon Garrison's dealings 
with Anti-slavery Societies, newspapers, 
and meetings by the light of the foregoing 
views. When a new religious movement 
begins to stir in a community, its members 
are drawn together through the spiritual 
likeness of one to the other. They are few : 
they are held together by persecution : they 
have all things in common. They need no 
creed ; they all feel as one. This stage can- 
not endure; for someone arises who wishes 
to hold office. The Apostles began quarrel- 
ing as to who should be greatest even during 
Christ's lifetime. As soon as any organiza- 
tion is formed, there arise differences of 
opinion, and the era of politics is reached. 
With our modern ideas of club organization 
for everything, a political element enters into 
any cause whenever two or three are gath- 
ered together in it. It ought to be a les- 
son to us to observe how completely all men, 
176 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

even great men, are the children of their 
age. Garrison took up the propagation of 
the Anti-slavery cause by means of Demo- 
cratic Societies, — a means which ties up any 
cause into little tight knots as it goes along, 
much as certain forms of crochet work prog- 
ress by adding little groups of hard knots to 
other groups of hard knots. The machinery 
of his movement made vigilance essential. 
He might be outvoted, his newspaper might 
be taken from him, his control might be de- 
stroyed at any juncture. He is obliged, at 
intervals, to throw himself into the intrigue 
of Anti-slavery government, with the words 
of Moses on his lips and some vote-getting, 
hall-packing device in his mind. This was 
not true of the earliest years of the move- 
ment; but came about through the mighty 
logic of natural law as the movement spread. 
Persecution purifies any new religion. As 
the wave of persecution which had held the 
Abolitionists together from 1830 to 1837 
began to subside, quarrels broke out. It was 
not until 1850 when the triumph of the 
Slave Power in the passage of the Compro- 
mise Bill, gave rise to a new and short perse- 
cution, that the Anti-slavery people enjoyed 
again a short period of unity and peace. 
The inevitable quarrels over creed and 
177 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

dogma set in in 1839. Anti-slavery de- 
veloped a complex and bitter political ac- 
tivity. This is the epoch of mutual pro- 
scriptions. The purity of the faith is ever 
at stake, New Organization is branded by 
Old Organization " as the v^orst form of pro- 
slavery." The Tocsin of Liberty main- 
tained : " The simple truth is, the American 
A. S. Society has linked itself to pro-slavery, 
to get friends — and, like the Colonization 
Society, it has become an obstacle to prog- 
ress which must be removed." Mr. Garri- 
son reported from the business committee, 
" that we cannot regard any man as a con- 
sistent Abolitionist who, while holding to 
the popular construction of the Constitution, 
makes himself a party to that instrument, by 
taking any office under it requiring an oath, 
or voting for its support." 

We can see to-day that it was through 
these very struggles that the new thought 
was penetrating the community. It is at 
first through the multiplication of new agen- 
cies, and later through an attack upon ex- 
isting agencies, and an absorption into the 
older organs of society, that new thought 
always sinks and spreads, touching and 
changing society both visibly and invisibly. 
This process is inevitable, but Garrison 
178 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

quarreled with it. He was ever wanting to 
keep the faith pure. He saw that no one else 
cared so much about the subject as he him- 
self did; and he thought that he must keep 
the precious ichor from pollution. As late 
as 1857, he moaned that if it had not been 
for the split in the Anti-slavery ranks in 
1840, slavery might have been abolished be- 
fore then. It was not given to him to see 
that he could have kept himself and all his 
following clear of all entanglements, and 
could have exerted the maximum of influ- 
ence with the minimum of effort, if he had 
simply formed no organization, but had 
merely taken in subscriptions for the cause, 
in his own name, and to do with as he 
pleased. His organization and his Liberator 
were in any case, and always, mere personal 
organs of his own : they followed his mental 
vagaries, they stuck to him, they were him- 
self; and this same result could have been 
accomplished with infinite heart's ease in- 
stead of infinite heart's anguish, had Garri- 
son but seen how to do it. In adopting a 
formal organization he was adopting part 
of the very element that his thought re- 
jected: he was fighting the cause of no- 
government by means of a "machine;" he 
was supporting the spirit by votes. 
179 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Hence Garrison's share in all the weari- 
some, little, and at times, degraded bicker- 
ing between Anti-slavery Societies; hence 
much personal vilification and heated talk 
over trifles. We see here also that these de- 
fects in Garrison proceed from a want of 
philosophic continuity of thought. Philo- 
sophic insight he had, but philosophic conti- 
nuity he had not. There came a time in the 
forties when he seems to have half-perceived 
the nature of his own mission, — to have 
half-seen, at least for a moment, that there 
were to be no simon-pure Abolitionists ex- 
cept himself, and that his function was to in- 
fluence the world from where he stood. 
This insight was probably the result of 
watching the Svame phenomena occur again 
and again, of seeing his Cause move con- 
stantly forward through an infinite series of 
failures : " As fast as we, the Old Organi- 
zation, make Abolitionists, the new converts 
run right into the Liberty Party, and become 
almost wholly hostile to us. This results 
from the strong leaning of our National 
character to politics. ... It is dis- 
heartening to see that every blow we strike 
thus tells in a degree against ourselves, and 
yet duty bids us keep on striking." It is 
Wendell Phillips who in this passage is ac- 
i8o 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

curately describing the operation of a great 
law of influence, and who yet seems to see 
in it merely evidence of human perversity. 
Later on, and especially during the war, Gar- 
rison became reconciled to that law, which 
his own life had ever blindly obeyed and ex- 
emplified. 

I must now speak of the matter of strong 
language. The prophet, great or small, is 
not so much an individual, as a part of the 
consciousness of all men. He acts in a par- 
ticular way upon the force of life, just as a 
prism acts in a particular way upon light. 
He is formed by pressure of some sort, and 
appears at critical times, just as a prism is 
created by pressure in the womb of the 
mountain. His understanding of his own 
function is uncertain, and there have been 
many plain-minded prophets who could suf- 
fer martyrdom, but not explain. I cannot 
find that even Socrates exactly imderstood 
the theory of agitation. The world some- 
times thinks of these men as stupid people 
who know not what they would be at. We 
should think of them as spirits who enact 
a lesson rather than as moralists who read 
a lecture. Let every man carry home what 
he can from the auto-da-fe. The prophets 
are hot volcanic lava, rolling out of some 
i8i 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

hidden furnace, — which is really a distribu- 
tive furnace, and overflows to a lesser de- 
gree in other men. 

The aerolites which fall in Terra del Fuego 
show much the same chemical nature as 
those of Iceland. So of these accusing, 
flaming aerolites of politics. The Jewish 
prophet is the most soft-hearted of them all, 
and it is to this variety that Garrison be- 
longs. These men see the suffering of the 
world, and they see or feel the relation be- 
tween the suffering of one man and the 
selfishness of the next. The greatest of 
them all speaks thus : 

" For they bind heavy burdens and griev- 
ous to be borne, and lay them on men's 
shoulders ; but they themselves will not move 
them with one of their fingers. But all 
their works they do for to be seen of men : 
they make broad their phylacteries, and en- 
large the borders of their garments, and 
love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the 
chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings 
in the markets, and to be called of men. 
Rabbi, Rabbi. 

" But woe unto you, Scribes and Phari- 
sees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the 
kingdom of heaven against men: for ye 
neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye 
182 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

them that are entering to go In. Woe unto 
ye Scribes and Pharisees, hyprocrites! for 
ye devour widows' houses, and for a pre- 
tence make long prayers : therefore ye shall 
receive the greater damnation. Woe unto 
you. Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for 
ye compass sea and land to make one prose- 
lyte; and when he is made, ye make him 
twofold more the child of hell than your- 
selves. Woe unto you, ye blind guides, 
which say. Whosoever shall swear by the 
temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall 
shall swear by the gold of the temple he is a 
debtor ! 

" Ye fools and blind : for whether is 
greater, the gold, or the temple that sancti- 
fieth the gold? Woe unto ye scribes and 
Pharsiees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of 
mint, and anise, and cummin, and have 
omitted the weightier matters of the law, 
judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye 
to have done and not leave the other undone. 
Woe unto ye scribes and Pharisees, hypo- 
crites ! because ye build the tombs of the 
prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the 
righteous, and say, If we had been in the 
days of our fathers, we would not have been 
partakers with them in the blood of the 
prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto 
183 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

yourselves, that ye are the children of them 
which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then 
the measure of your fathers. 

" Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, 
how can ye escape the damnation of hell? 
Wherefore, behold, I send unto you proph- 
ets, and wise men, and scribes : and some 
of them ye shall kill and crucify, and 
some of them ye shall scourge in your syna- 
gogues, and persecute them from city to 
city: that upon you may come all the 
righteous blood shed upon the earth, from 
the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of 
Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew 
between the temple and the altar. Verily 
I say unto you, all these things shall come 
upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
salem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
often would I have gathered thy children 
together, even as a hen gathereth her chick- 
ens under her wings, and ye would not! 
Behold your house is left unto you desolate. 
For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me 
henceforth, till ye shall say. Blessed is he 
that cometh in the name of the Lord." 

The tone of these denunciations is not an 
accidental characteristic of Christ's. It is 
an organic product, a concomitant of the 
184 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

hottest, most personal love of men that has 
ever been known upon the earth. Here 
then is an outpouring of lava. Vainly 
might we call this passion, idle, unphilo- 
sophical, lacking in courtesy; or say that it 
fails to distinguish between the sinner and 
the sin. Granted : granted. Yet this is the 
way a man speaks who feels as Christ felt. 
If Christ's way of feeling be right, there is 
something right about his mode of expres- 
sion. Somewhere, somehow, this heat is 
valuable. In some sense these whirling 
words are true, just, adequate and scientific. 
They do something which nothing else will 
do. You say there is evil in them. You 
are mistaken : there is no evil in them : there 
is nothing uncharitable in them. They are 
the terrible music of social agony. You 
would speak thus yourself, could you see as 
clearly, feel as keenly, as did Christ. Your 
calmness is only possible because your heart 
is cold, or your eyes dim. 

Let us now remember what mild gentle- 
men those Pharisees were, to whom Christ 
used such strong language. How inoffen- 
sive their vices, — a little usury, some busi- 
ness villainy, perhaps, a good deal of con- 
ventional hypocrisy, front pews in church, 
public charity-giving. That old Jewish so- 
185 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ciety was probably the most moral society 
that ever existed. If we consider its thou- 
sand years of prophets, its literature of ethics 
and of devotion, its popular passion for the- 
ology, its passion for those discussions which 
went on constantly in temple and market- 
place, and which show a deeper clutch upon 
truth than Athens at her best could show, 
— if we consider what sort of men 
those Scribes and Pharisees probably were, 
we shall have to confess that Christ's rebuke 
fell on men whose faults were mild com- 
pared to the atrocities visible in the modern 
world. Examine the morning newspaper 
and you will find fiendish cruelties unknown 
in Judea. 

At the back of the prophet's emotion is 
his vision of a relation between innocent suf- 
fering and half-innocent selfishness. If you 
should see a man being burned alive by re- 
spectable rate-payers, you would cry out, 
you, — yet not you but something in you, — 
would burst into agonized protest, accusing 
those rate-payers ; and your language would 
be harsh. Such is the explanation of the 
strong language of Anti-slavery. The Ab- 
olitionists were the only people in the coun- 
try who effectually saw what was going on. 
They saw the slave-block, they saw the child 
186 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

reft from the mother, they saw the floggings 
and the despair. A hundred volumes might 
be compiled out of old newspapers by cull- 
ing advertisements like the following from 
the Charleston Courier in 1825: 

" Twenty dollars reward, — > ran away 
from the subscriber, on the 14th instant, a 
negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 17 
years of age, slim made, lately branded on 
her left cheek, thus, ' R,' and a piece is taken 
off her left ear on the same side; the same 
letter is branded on the inside of both her 

^^^^' " Abner Ross, 

" Fairfield District, S. Cr 
Let any serious-minded man read a few 
pages of the Key to ** Uncle Tom's Cabin/* 
or of Theodore D. Weld's book on American 
Slavery, before he decides to discountenance 
strong language. The people of the South 
did not know about the horrors of slavery, 
and taught their children not to see them; 
they glossed them over, as the inevitable un- 
pleasantnesses of life are always glossed 
over. John S. Wise was a typical child of 
the South, save that he had a Northern 
mother. He was the son of Henry A. 
Wise, the famous Governor of Virginia, and 
he has given us a book of memoirs, " The 
187 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

End of An Era," which will be read as long 
as the Civil War is remembered. John S. 
Wise had never heard of a slave-auction, till 
a Northern uncle, whom he met or visited in 
Philadelphia, took him to see " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin " on the stage. This was in the fif- 
ties, and when John S. Wise was a young 
lad. On returning to Richmond he visited 
a slave-auction, and was as much horrified 
as a Northern boy would have been. The 
horrors of slavery were unknown to the 
South, and ten times more unknown to the 
North, when the Abolitionists discovered 
them. 

I have noticed in recent years one or two 
denunciations of business wickedness, in 
which a fierce invective seemed to tear the 
skin from the victim's body. One writer 
pictured the descent of disease upon the bad 
man, — how his hair fell from his scalp. 
Now in all these cases, — in the case of 
Christ, of the Abolitionists, and of the de- 
nouncers of business wickedness, — the deli- 
cate mind is shocked. It is shocked because 
it reads in cold blood what is merely the in- 
stinctive expression of hot feeling. It sees 
malice where there is no malice The 
truth is that instinctive expression does 
something which philosophic analysis can- 
i88 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

not do : it reaches the soul, it raises the tem- 
perature and lets in light. The danger of 
denunciation lies in the temptation to use 
denunciation as a method of reform. The 
spontaneous cry of pity ought never to be 
transformed into a lash; nor should the 
flames of righteous indignation be ex- 
ploited politically, and used to cook up re- 
form. There is nothing of this kind in the 
New Testament, but there was a good deal 
of it in Anti-slavery history. Garrison 
made a method of personal vilification; he 
would cover the wicked with " thick in- 
famy." He was a gadfly and a fury in his 
own conception. His utterances are not al- 
ways, like Christ's, lyrical utterances; they 
are calculated attacks. This is hardly a 
matter, however, upon which one can make 
a general statement that will cover all cases. 
The particular thing uttered by Garrison 
must, in each case, be considered by itself. 
There are moments when Garrison is in- 
spired. His faith is perfect. In reviewing 
the first year of the Liberator's activity, he 
wrote : " Last year I felt as if I were fight- 
ing single-handed against the great enemy; 
now I see around me a host of valiant war- 
riors, armed with weapons of an immortal 
temper, whom nothing can daunt, and who 
189 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

are pledged to the end of the contest. The 
number is increasing with singular rapidity. 
The standard which has been lifted up in 
Boston is attracting the gaze of the nation, 
and inspiring the drooping hearts of thou- 
sands with hope and courage. 

" As for myself, whatever may be my fate 

— whether I fall in the spring-time of man- 
hood by the hand of the assassin, or be im- 
mured in a Georgia cell, or be permitted to 
live to a ripe old age — I know that the suc- 
cess of your cause depends nothing upon my 
existence. I am but as a drop in the ocean, 
which, if it be separated, cannot be missed. 
My own faith is strong — my vision, clear 

— my consolation, great. ' Who art thou 

great mountain? Before Zerubbabel 
thou shalt become a plain : and he shall bring 
the headstone thereof with shoutings, cry- 
ing, Grace, grace unto it ! ' " Surely this is 
beautiful: it is inspired; it is unconscious. 

The following description of the Coloniza- 
tion Society seems to me to be truly Hebraic 
in its celestial rage, — " Upon this pamphlet 

1 shall be willing to stake my reputation for 
honesty, prudence, benevolence, truth, and 
sagaciousness. If I do not prove the Colo- 
nization spirit to be a creature without heart, 
without brains, eyeless, unnatural, hypocriti- 

190 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

cal, relentless, unjust, then nothing is capable 
of demonstration." The reader may turn 
over Garrison's utterances and pick out the 
lyrical from the political by the light of his 
own feeling. In doing so he will find him- 
self forgiving more, the more he becomes ac- 
quainted with Garrison's world. The fol- 
lowing words about Henry Clay seem cruel : 
" Henry Clay — with one foot in the grave, 
and just ready to have body and soul cast 
into Hell — as if eager to make his damna- 
tion doubly sure, rises in the United States 
Senate and proposes an inquiry into the ex- 
pediency of passing yet another law, by 
which every one who shall dare peep or mut- 
ter against the execution of the Fugitive 
Slave Law shall have his life crushed out." 

When we learn, however, that the Fugi- 
tive Slave Law of 1850 provided that the 
negro in Massachusetts might be identified 
through the mere affidavit of the slave- 
holder agent; that the slave could not testify 
himself; that there was no trial by jury; 
that the commissioner's fee was doubled if 
the slaveholder prevailed ; that the bystander 
could be summoned to aid in preventing an 
escape, and that, in case any person assisted 
the escape, such person should be fined a 
thousand dollars, or imprisoned not exceed- 
191 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ing SIX months ; when we learn that modern 
historians have accounted for its diabolical 
provisions by suggesting that this Fugitive 
Slave Bill was intended to involve such hu- 
miliation to the North that the North would 
not swallow it, but would reject it and 
thereby give the South grounds for seces- 
sion; when we reflect that the North did 
swallow this law, and that thousands of 
free colored people throughout the Northern 
cities, innocent and industrious citizens, 
were at that time fleeing to Canada ; — when 
we remember these facts, we begin to feel 
that Garrison's language was by no means 
too strong. 

When all has been said in his favor, there 
remains a certain debauchery of language in 
Garrison, which came from his occupation: 
he was a journalist. If a man writes all the 
time, his mannerisms become intensified. 
Garrison became a common scold, — and yet 
not a common scold, because his inner 
temper was perfect, and his subject the great 
subject of the age. He is ever driving his 
Cause, and feels he must evoke immediate 
response at every instant. His lack of good 
taste is not unconnected with his weakness 
in abstract thinking. To him Slavery in 
the concrete was the evil. He had not the 
192 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

philosophic power to perceive that sin was 
the real evil. The evils were injustice, 
cruelty, murder, lust, egoism. These things 
he believed to be the outcome of Slavery. 

It is not, however, the harshness of lan- 
guage that we are quarreling with. What 
displeases us in Garrison is the element of 
policy, the wholesale element in his method. 
But let us beware lest in straining at a gnat 
we swallow a camel; and let us remember 
that what is offensive to us, physicked the 
nation. The young Garrison, the man of 
twenty-four, when he discovered Immediate 
Emancipation, was the vortex of an unseen 
whirlpool. Through his brain spun the tur- 
billion. Something was to break forth; for 
the power was bursting its envelope. The 
flood issued in the form in which we know 
it, — with purposed vilification, with exco- 
riating harshness, with calculated ferocity. 
Only in this manner could it issue : the dam 
could hold the flood no longer, nor lift it 
into poetic expression. 

If you take the great political agitators of 
the world like Luther, Calvin, Savonarola, 
Garibaldi, or certain of the English church 
reformers, you will find that these men al- 
ways live under a terrible strain, and they 
generally give way somewhere. No one can 
193 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

imagine how fierce is the blast upon a man's 
nervous system, when he stands in the midst 
of universal antagonism, solitary and at 
bay. The continuousness of the trial is apt 
to wear upon the character of reformers. 
Through vanity, or love of power, or 
through sheer nervous exhaustion, they be- 
come guilty of cruelty or tainted with ambi- 
tion. There is generally something to for- 
give in the history of such men. Now Gar- 
rison is almost perfect: he is perfect in his 
lack of personal ambition, in his indifference 
to power, in his courage, his faith, his per- 
sistence, his benevolence. When he breaks 
down it is in driblets, and every day, — in 
the bad taste and self-indulgence of a dis- 
gusting rhetoric, in his inability to " shut 
up " about anything, in his use of the per- 
sonal pronoun. Through these channels his 
nervous exhaustion is worked off, and the 
inner heart of the creature is left free from 
the great temptations. 

All this armor of language was the para- 
phernalia of the arena, which was, as it 
were, handed to Garrison from without, — 
from on high, from within. He puts it on, 
and enters the lists : he puts it off, and takes 
supper with his family. As for the kind of 
man which he really was, the testimony is 
194 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

universal and uniform. I copy one or two 
phrases almost at random, from among the 
innumerable descriptions of him. Richard 
D. Webb, an Irish Abolitionist, and a very 
old friend of all the Anti-slavery people, 
wrote : '' I . . . spent three weeks with 
the Garrisons in Paris and Switzerland. It 
was a time of intense enjoyment, for I ex- 
ceedingly liked my companions. . . . 
As to Mr. Garrison himself, he is the most 
delightful man I have ever know^n — mag- 
nanimous, generous, considerate, and, as far 
as I can see, every way morally excellent. 
I can perceive that he has large faith, is very 
credulous, is not deeply read, and has little 
of the curiosity or thirst for knowledge 
which educated people are prone to. But, 
take him for all in all, I know no such other 
man. His children are most affectionate 
and free with him — yet they have their own 
opinions and express them freely, even when 
they differ most widely from his. . . . 
People who travel together have an excellent 
opportunity of knowing and testing one an- 
other. ... I have never on the whole 
known a man who bears to be more thor- 
oughly known, or is so sure to be loved and 
reverenced." 

Harriet Martineau has left us a record of 
195 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

her first Impressions in all their freshness : — 
" At ten o'clock he came, accompanied by 
his introducer. His aspect put to flight in 
an instant what prejudices his slanderers had 
raised in me. I was wholly taken by sur- 
prise. It was a countenance glowing with 
health, and wholly expressive of purity, ani- 
mation, and gentleness. I did not wonder 
at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison 
at a shop window without a name to it, went 
in and bought it, and framed it as the most 
saintlike of countenances. The end of the 
story is, that when the citizen found whose 
portrait he had been hanging up in his par- 
lor, he took the print out of the frame and 
huddled it away." 

The lion and the lamb dwelt together in 
Garrison ; but the lion was a peculiar lion, he 
was never really in control of Garrison, as 
the lion in Luther was sometimes in control 
of Luther. The following anecdote from 
Mr. May's reminiscences gives us a glimpse 
of the social side of Garrison and shows the 
perplexities into which his methods of agita- 
tion naturally led the public. The scene is 
upon a steamboat. 

" There was much earnest talking by other 
parties beside our own. Presently a gentle- 
man turned from one of them to me and 
196 



THE MAN OF ACTION 

said, * What, sir, are the Abolitionists going 
to do in Philadelphia?' I informed him 
that we intended to form a National Anti- 
slavery Society. This brought from him an 
outpouring of the commonplace objections 
to our enterprise, which I replied to as well 
as I was able. Mr. Garrison drew near, and 
I soon shifted my part of the discussion into 
his hands, and listened with delight to the 
admirable manner in which he expounded 
and maintained the doctrines and purposes 
of those who believed with him that the 
slaves — the blackest of them — were men, 
entitled as much as the whitest and most 
exalted men in the land to their liberty, to a 
residence here, if they chose, and to acquire 
as much wisdom, as much property, and as 
high a position as they may. 

" After a long conversation, which at- 
tracted as many as could get within hearing, 
the gentleman said, courteously : ' I have 
been much interested, sir, in what you have 
said, and in the exceedingly frank and tem- 
perate manner in which you have treated the 
subject. If all Abolitionists were like you, 
there would be much less opposition to your 
enterprise. But, sir, depend upon it, that 
hair-brained, reckless, violent fanatic, Gar- 
rison will damage, if he does not shipwreck. 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

any cause.' Stepping forward, I replied, 
' Allow me, sir, to introduce you to Mr, Gar- 
rison, of whom you entertain so bad an opin- 
ion. The gentleman you have been talking 
with is he.' " 

The gayety of temperament and a certain 
bubbling power of enjoyment which Garri- 
son possessed he shared with all, or almost 
all, the Abolitionists ; their work made them 
happy. " I have seen him intimately," said 
Wendell Phillips, *' for thirty years, while 
raining on his head was the hate of the com- 
munity, when by every possible form of ex- 
pression malignity let him know that it 
wished him all sorts of harm. I never saw 
him unhappy. I never saw the moment that 
serene abounding faith in the rectitude of his 
motive, the soundness of his method, and 
the certainty of success did not lift him 
above all possibility of being reached by 
any clamor about him.'* 



198 



VIII 
THE RYNDERS MOB 

The Anti-slavery meeting at the Broadway 
Tabernacle on May 7, 1851, which goes by 
the name of the Rynders Mob, has an inter- 
est quite beyond the boundaries of its epoch. 
It gives an example of how any disturbance 
that arises in a public meeting ought to be 
handled by the managers of the meeting. 
It has a lesson for all agitators and popular 
speakers. It gives, indeed, a picture of 
humanity during a turbulent crisis, a pic- 
ture that is Athenian, Roman, Mediaeval, 
modern, — a scene of democratic life, flung 
to us from the ages. I shall copy the ac- 
count of this meeting almost verbatim from 
the large Life of Garrison. No comment 
can add to the power of it. 

We have to remember that Webster had 
made his famous Compromise speech just 
two months before this meeting; and that 
the phalanxes of all conservative people, 
from George Ticknor, in Boston, to the row- 
dies on the Bowery in New York, were be- 
199 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ing marshalled to repress Abolition as they 
had not been marshalled since 1835. It 
must be noted also that this attempt suc- 
ceeded on the whole. In spite of the tri- 
umph which the Abolitionists scored at this 
particular meeting, it became impossible for 
them to hold meetings in great cities for 
some time afterwards. The complicity of 
the Churches with Slavery is now almost 
forgotten. Among the Abolitionists dur- 
ing the critical epoch there was to 
be found no Episcopal clergyman (save 
the Rev. E. P. Wells, of Boston, who early 
withdrew from the Cause) and no Catholic 
priest. The Abolition leaders were, never- 
theless, drawn largely from the clerical 
ranks ; but they were Unitarians, Methodists, 
Congregationalists, Baptists, etc., and were 
generally driven from their own pulpits in 
consequence of their opinions about Slavery. 
The Ecclesiastical Apologists for Slavery 
founded their case upon the New Testament. 
A literature of exegesis was in existence of 
which the " View of Slavery " by John 
Henry Hopkins, D.D., L.L.D., Episcopal 
Bishop of the Diocese of Vermont, is a late 
example. At this time Zachary Taylor, a 
slaveholder and a devout Episcopalian, was 
president of the United States. 
200 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

The situation was a difficult one for the 
Evangelical, anti-sectarian mind to deal with. 
What was the use of quoting the New Testa- 
ment to slaveholders, who were already for- 
tified out of that very volume? The effect 
of the situation on Garrison's temperament 
may be seen in the meeting at the Taber- 
nacle. There is a demonic element in what 
he says: his utterance is forced out of him: 
it is not calculated. You could not repro- 
duce the spirit of this utterance except at 
the cost of two centuries of human passion. 
There is a demonic element also in Garri- 
son's courage. He displays, on this occa- 
eion, at least two kinds of genius, the genius 
of satire, — Voltaire might have uttered the 
scathing slashes about *' Christ in the presi- 
dental chair," — and the all but antipodal 
genius of infinite sweetness of temperament. 

The New York Herald in advance of the 
meeting denounced Garrison for many days 
in succession, and advised the breaking up 
of the meeting by violence. According to 
the Herald, " Garrison boldly urges the ut- 
ter overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, 
and the Bible. Nothing has been sacred 
with him but the ideal intellect of the negro 
race. To elevate this chimera, he has urged 
the necessity of an immediate overthrow of 



20I 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, 

the Government, a total disrespect for the 
Constitution, actual disruption and annihila- 
tion of the Union, and a cessation of all 
order, legal or divine, which does not square 
with his narrow views of what constitutes 
human liberty. Never, in the time of the 
French Revolution and blasphemous atheism, 
was there more malevolence and unblushing 
wickedness avowed than by this same Gar- 
rison. Indeed, he surpasses Robespierre and 
his associates, for he has no design of build- 
ing up. His only object is to destroy. 
. . . In Boston, a few months ago, a 
convention was held, the object of which 
was the overthrow of Sunday worship. 
Thus it appears that nothing divine or sec- 
ular is respected by these fanatics. . . . 
When free discussion does not promote the 
public good, it has no more right to exist 
than a bad government that is dangerous and 
oppressive to the common weal. It should 
be overthrown. On the question of useful- 
ness to the public of the packed, organized 
meetings of these Abolitionists, socialists, 
Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can 
be but one result arrived at by prudence 
and patriotism. They are dangerous as- 
semblies — calculated for mischief, and 
treasonable in their character and purposes. 

202 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

Though the law cannot reach them, public 
opinion can; and as, in England, a peaceful 
dissent from such doctrines as these fellows 
would promulgate — a strong expression of 
hisses and by counter statements and exposi- 
tions, so here in New York we may antici- 
pate that there are those who will enter the 
arena of discussion, and send out the true 
opinion of the public. . . ." 

The meeting of May 7, at the Tabernacle, 
was a vast assembly which contained many 
respectable people, intermingled with whom 
was an organized element of impending 
mob. The leader of the mob was a well- 
know ruffian called Isaiah Rynders, " a na- 
tive American, of mixed German and Irish 
lineage, now some forty-six years of age. 
He began life as a boatman on the Hudson 
River, and, passing easily into the sporting 
class, went to seek his fortunes as a profes- 
sional gambler in the paradise of the South- 
west. In this region he became familiar 
with all forms of violence, including the in- 
stitution of slavery. After many personal 
hazards and vicissitudes, he returned to New 
York city, where he proved to be admirably 
qualified for local political leadership in con- 
nection with Tammany Hall. A sporting- 
house which he opened became a Democratic 
203 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

rendezvous and the headquarters of the Em- 
pire Club, an organization of roughs and 
desperadoes who acknowledged his ' cap- 
taincy.' His campaigning in behalf of Polk 
and Dallas in 1844 secured him the friendly 
patronage of the successful candidate for 
Vice-President, and he took office as 
Weigher in the Custom-house of the me- 
tropolis. He found time, while thus em- 
ployed, to engineer the Astor Place riot on 
behalf of the actor Forrest against his Eng- 
lish rival Macready, on May 10, 1849, ^''^^ 
the year 1850 opened with his trial for this 
atrocity and his successful defense by John 
Van Buren. On February 16 he and his 
Club broke up an anti-Wilmot Proviso meet- 
ing in New York — a seeming inconsistency, 
but it was charged against Rynders that he 
had offered to * give the State of New York 
to Clay ' in the election of 1844 for $30,000, 
and had met with reluctant refusal. In 
March he was arrested for a brutal assault 
on a gentleman in a hotel, but the victim and 
the witnesses found it prudent not to appear 
against a ruffian who did not hesitate to 
threaten the district-attorney in open court. 
Meanwhile, the new Whig Administration 
quite justifiably discharged Rynders from 
the Custom-house, leaving him free to pose 
204 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

as a savior of the Union against traitors — 
a savior of society against blasphemers and 
infidels wherever encountered. . . ." 

When the meeting was brought to order 
Mr. Garrison, as an opening exercise, read 
certain passages of the Bible, chosen with 
reference to their bearing upon the slave 
trade : " The Lord standeth up to plead, 
and standeth to judge the people. . . . 
What mean ye that ye beat my people to 
pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith 
the Lord God of Hosts. . . . Associ- 
ate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be 
broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye 
shall be broken in pieces. . . . They all 
lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man 
his brother with a net. . . . Hide the 
outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth; 
let mine outcasts dwell with thee ; be thou a 
covert to them from the face of the spoiler." 

" To Dr. Furness, who sat beside Mr. 
Garrison, these selections (in full, not in our 
abstract) seemed ' most admirably adapted to 
the existing state of our country. His read- 
ing, however, was not remarkably effective. 
It was like the ordinary reading of the pul- 
pit,' — and hence not calculated to stir the 
wrath of the ungodly. 

"The reading of the Treasurer's report 

205 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

followed, and then Mr. Garrison, resigning 
the chair to Francis Jackson, proceeded to 
make the first speech of the day. 

" He began," says Dr. Furness, " with 
stating that they, the members of the Anti- 
slavery Society, regarded the Anti-slavery 
cause as emphatically the Christian move- 
ment of the day. Nothing could be more 
explicit than his recognition of the truth and 
divine authority of the Christianity of the 
New Testament. He went on to examine 
the popular tests of religion, and to show 
their defectiveness. In so doing, his man- 
ner was grave and dignified. There was no 
bitterness, no levity. His manner of speak- 
ing was simple, clerical, and Christian. His 
subject was, substantially, that we have, over 
and over again, in all the pulpits of the land 
— the inconsistency of our profession and 
practice — although not with the same appli- 
cation. . . . Mr. Garrison said great 
importance was attached to a belief in Jesus. 
We were told that we must believe in Jesus. 
And yet this faith in Jesus had no vitality, 
no practical bearing on conduct and char- 
acter. He had previously, however, passed 
in rapid review the chief religious denomina- 
tions, showing that they uttered no protest 
against the sins of the nation. He spoke 
206 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

first in this connection of the Roman Catho- 
lic Church, stating that its priests and mem- 
bers held slaves without incurring the re- 
buke of the Church." 

Up to this time the only symptoms of op- 
position had been some ill-timed and sense- 
less applause — or what seemed such. And 
as it came from one little portion of the audi- 
ence, Dr. Furness asked Wendell Phillips at 
his side what it meant. * It means,' he said, 
* that there is to be a row.' The reference 
to the Catholic Church gave the first opening 
to the leader of the gang." 

The following is from the New York Her- 
ald's account of the meeting: ** Captain Ryn- 
ders (who occupied a position in the back- 
ground, at one side of the organ-loft, and 
commanding a bird's eye view of the whole 
scene beneath) here said : Will you allow me 
to ask you a question? (Excitement and con- 
fusion.) 

" Mr. Garrison — Yes, sir. 

" Captain Rynders — The question I 
would ask is, whether there are no other 
churches as well as the Catholic Church, 
whose clergy and lay members hold slaves? 

"Mr. Garrison — Will the friend wait 
for a moment, and I will answer him in 
reference to other churches." (Cheers.) 
207 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

(Dr. Furness says that Mr. Garrison ex- 
pressed no surprise at the interruption. 
There was not the shghtest change in his 
manner or his voice. He simply said : ** My 
friend, if you will wait a moment, your ques- 
tion shall be answered," or something to that 
effect. There instantly arose a loud clapping 
around the stranger in the gallery, and from 
the outskirts of the audience, at different 
points.) 

Captain Rynders then resumed his seat. 
Mr. Garrison thus proceeded: ** Shall we 
look to the Episcopal Church for hope ? It 
was the boast of John C. Calhoun, shortly 
before his death, that that church was im- 
pregnable to Anti-slavery. That vaunt was 
founded on truth, for the Episcopal clergy 
and laity are buyers and sellers of human 
flesh. We cannot, therefore, look to them. 
Shall we look to the Presbyterian Church? 
The whole weight of it is on the side of op- 
pression. Ministers and people buy and sell 
slaves, apparently without any compunc- 
tious visitings of conscience. We cannot, 
therefore, look to them, nor to the Baptists, 
nor the Methodists ; for they, too, are against 
the slave, and all the sects are combined to 
prevent that jubilee which it is the will of 
God should come. . . . 
208 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

" Be not startled when I say that a belief 
in Jesus is no evidence of goodness (hisses) ; 
no, friends. 

" Voice — Yes it is. 

" Mr. Garrison — Our friend says * yes ' ; 
my position is * no.' It is worthless as a 
test, for the reason I have already assigned 
in reference to the other tests. His praises 
are sung in Louisiana, Alabama, and the 
other Southern States just as well as in 
Massachusetts. 

'* Captain Rynders — Are you aware that 
the slaves in the South have their prayer- 
meetings in honor of Christ? 

" Mr. Garrison — Not a slaveholding or a 
slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.) The 
slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off 
chains. In this country, Jesus has become 
obsolete. A profession in him is no longer 
a test. Who objects to his course in Ju- 
daea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and 
may safely be denounced. Jesus is the most 
respectable person in the United States. 
(Great sensation, and murmurs of disap- 
probation.) Jesus sits in the President's 
chair of the United States. (A thrill of 
horror here seemed to run through the as- 
sembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which 
is the same thing, for he believes in Jesus. 
209 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

He believes in war, and the Jesus * that gave 
the Mexicans hell.' (Sensation, uproar, and 
confusion.) 

*' The name of Zachary Taylor had 
scarcely passed Mr. Garrison's lips when 
Captain Rynders, with something like a 
howl, forsaking his strategic position on the 
border-line of the gallery and the platform, 
dashed headlong down towards the speaker's 
desk, followed, with shouting and impreca- 
tions and a terrifying noise, by the mass of 
his backers. The audience, despite a natural 
agitation, gave way to no panic. The 
Abolitionist leaders upon the platform re- 
mained imperturbable. * I was not aware,' 
writes Dr. Furness, ' of being under any ap- 
prehension of personal violence. We were 
all like General Jackson's cotton-bales at 
New Orleans. Our demeanor made it im- 
possible for the rioters to use any physical 
force against us/ Rynders found himself 
in the midst of Francis and Edmund Jack- 
son, of Wendell Phillips, of Edmund 
Quincy, of Charles F. Hovey, of William 
H. Furness, of Samuel May, Jr., of Sydney 
Howard Gay, of Isaac T. Hopper, of Henry 
C. Wright, of Abbey Kelley Foster, of Fred- 
erick Douglass, of Mr. Garrison — against 
whom his menaces were specially directed. 

2IO 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

Never was a human being more out of his 
element." 

The following, according to the Herald, 
was what greeted Mr. Garrison's ear: 

** Captain Rynders (clenching his fist) — 
I will not allow you to assail the President 
of the United States. You shan't do it 
(shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison). 

" Many voices — Turn him out, turn him 
out! 

" Captain Rynders — If a million of you 
were there, I would not allow the President 
of the United States to be insulted. As 
long as you confined yourself to your sub- 
ject, I did not interfere ; but I will not per- 
mit you or any other man to misrepresent 
the President." 

Mr. Garrison, as the Rev. Samuel May 
testifies, " calmly replied that he had simply 
quoted some recent words of General Tay- 
lor, and appealed to the audience if he had 
said aught in disrespect of him." "You 
ought not to interrupt us," he continued to 
Rynders — in the quietest manner conceiv- 
able, as Dr. Furness relates. " We go upon 
the principle of hearing everybody. If you 
wish to speak, I will keep order, and you 
shall be heard." The din, however, in- 
creased. *' The Hutchinsons," continues Dr. 

211 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Furness, " who were wont to sing at the 
Anti-slavery meetings, were in the gallery, 
and they attempted to raise a song, to soothe 
the savages with music. But it was of no 
avail. Rynders drowned their fine voices 
with noise and shouting." Still, a knock- 
down argument with a live combatant would 
have suited him better than mere Bedlam- 
itish disturbance. He was almost gratified 
by young Thomas L. Kane, son of Judge 
Kane of Philadelphia, who, seeing the rush 
of the mob upon the platform, had himself 
leaped there, to protect his townsman, Dr. 
Furness. " They shall not touch a hair of 
your head," he said in a tone of great ex- 
citement; and, as the strain became more 
intense, he rushed up to Rynders and shook 
his fist in his face. He said to me (Dr. 
Furness) with the deepest emphasis: " If he 
touches Mr. Garrison I'll kill him." But 
Mr. Garrison's composure was more than 
a coat of mail. 

The knot was cut by Francis Jackson's 
formal ofYer of the fioor to Rynders as soon 
as Mr. Garrison had finished his remarks; 
with an invitation meanwhile to take a seat 
on the platform. This, says Mr. May, he 
scoutingly refused ; but, seeing the manifest 
fairness of the president's offer, drew back a 

212 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

little, and stood, with folded arms, waiting 
for Mr. Garrison to conclude, which soon he 
did, — offering a resolution in these terms: 

" Resolved, That the Anti-slavery move- 
ment, instead of being * infidel,' in an evil 
sense (as is falsely alleged), is truly Chris- 
tian, in the primitive meaning of that term, 
and the special embodiment in this country 
of whatever is loyal to God and benevolent 
to man; and that, in view of the palpable 
enormity of slavery — of the religious and 
political professions of the people — of the 
age in which we live, blazing with the con- 
centrated light of many centuries — indif- 
ference or hostility to this movement indi- 
cates a state of mind more culpable than was 
manifested by the Jewish nation in rejecting 
Jesus as the Messiah, eighteen hundred years 
ago." 

With these words the speaker retired, to 
resume the presidency of the meeting. 

"The close of Mr. Garrison's address," 
says Dr. Furness, '' brought down Rynders 
again, who vociferated and harangued, at 
one time on the platform, and then pushing 
down into the aisles, like a madman followed 
by his keepers. Through the whole, noth- 
ing could be more patient and serene than 
the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have al- 
213 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ways revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, 
uncompromising fidelity to his great cause. 
To-day I was touched to the heart by his 
calm and gentle manners. There was no 
agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quiet- 
ness of a man engaged in simple duties." 

After some parleying, it appeared that 
Rynders had a spokesman who preferred to 
speak after Dr. Furness. 

" Accordingly," says the latter, " I spoke 
my little, anxiously prepared word. I never 
recall that hour without blessing myself that 
I was called to speak precisely at that mo- 
ment. At any other stage of the proceed- 
ings, it would have been wretchedly out of 
place. As it was, my speech fitted in almost 
as well as if it had been impromptu, although 
a sharp eye might easily have discovered 
that I was speaking memoriter. Rynders 
interrupted me again and again, exclaiming 
that I lied, that I was personal ; but he ended 
with applauding me ! " 

No greater contrast to what was to follow 
could possibly be imagined than the genial 
manner, firm tones, and self-possession, the 
refined discourse, of this Unitarian clergy- 
man, who was felt to have turned the cur- 
rent of the meeting. There uprose, as per 
agreement, one " Professor " Grant, a seedy- 
214 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

looking personage, having one hand tied 
round with a dirty cotton cloth. Mr. Garri- 
son recognized him as a former pressman in 
the Liberator office. His thesis was that the 
blacks were not men, but belonged to the 
monkey tribe. His speech proved dull and 
tiresome, and was made sport of by his own 
set, whom Mr. Garrison had to call to order. 
There were now loud cries for Frederick 
Douglass, who came forward to where Ryn- 
ders stood in the conspicuous position he 
had taken when he thought the meeting was 
his, and who remained in it, too mortified 
even to creep away, when he found it was 
somebody else's. " Now you can speak," 
said he to Douglass ; " but mind what I say : 
if you speak disrespectfully (of the South, 
or Washington, or Patrick Henry) I'll 
knock you off the stage." Nothing daunted, 
the ex-fugitive from greater terrors began: 

" The gentleman who has just spoken has 
undertaken to prove that the blacks are not 
human beings. He has examined our 
whole conformation, from top to toe. I 
cannot follow him in his argument. I will 
assist him in it, however. I offer myself 
for your examination. Am I a man?" 

The audience responded with a thunder- 
ous affirmative, which Captain Rynders 
215 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

sought to break by exclaiming: " You are 
not a black man; you are only half a nig- 
ger." " Then/' replied Mr. Douglass, turn- 
ing upon him with the blandest of smiles 
and an almost affectionate obeisance, " I am 
half-brother to Captain Rynders!" He 
would not deny that he was the son of a 
slaveholder, born of Southern " amalgama- 
tion " ; a fugitive, too, like Kossuth — " an- 
other half-brother of mine" (to Rynders). 
He spoke of the difficulties thrown in the 
way of industrious colored people at the 
North, as he had himself experienced — 
this by way of answer to Horace Greeley, 
who had recently complained of their in- 
efficiency and dependence. Criticism of the 
editor of the Tribune being grateful to 
Rynders, a political adversary, " he added 
a word to Douglass's against Greeley. * I 
am happy,' said Douglass, *" to have the as- 
sent of my half-brother here/ pointing to 
Rynders, and convulsing the audience with 
laughter. After this, Rynders, finding how 
he was played with, took care to hold his 
peace; but someone of Rynders' company 
in the gallery undertook to interrupt the 
speaker. ' It's of no use,' said Mr. Doug- 
lass, ' I've Captain Rynders here to back 
me.' " " We were born here," he said 
216 



THE RYNDERS MOB 

finally, " we are not dying out, and we mean 
to stay here. We made the clothes you have 
on, the sugar you put into your tea. We 
would do more if allowed." " Yes," said 
a voice in the crowd, " you would cut our 
throats for us." " No," was the quick re- 
sponse, " but we would cut your hair for 
you." 

Douglass concluded his triumphant re- 
marks by calling upon the Rev. Samuel R. 
Ward, editor of the Impartial Citizen, to 
succeed him. " All eyes," says Dr. Fur- 
ness, " were instantly turned to the back of 
the platform, or stage rather, so dramatic 
was the scene; and there, amidst a group, 
stood a large man, so black that, as Wendell 
Phillips said, when he shut his eyes you 
could not see him. As he approached, 
Rynders exclaimed : ' Well, this is the orig- 
inal nigger.' * I've heard of the magnanim- 
ity of Captain Rynders,' said Ward, 'but 
the half has not been told me ! ' And then 
he went on with a noble voice and his speech 
was such a strain of eloquence as I never 
heard excelled before or since." The mob 
had to applaud him, too, and it is the high- 
est praise to record that his unpremeditated 
utterance maintained the level of Doug- 
lass's, and ended the meeting with a sense 
217 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

of climax — demonstrating alike the hu- 
manity and the capacity of the full-blooded 
negro. 

" When he ceased speaking, the time had 
expired for which the Tabernacle was en- 
gaged, and we had to adjourn. Never," 
continues Dr. Furness, '' was there a 
grander triumph of intelligence, of mind, 
over brute force. Two colored men, whose 
claim to be considered human was denied, 
had, by mere force of intellect, overwhelmed 
their maligners with confusion. As the 
audience was thinning out, I went down on 
the floor to see some friends there. Ryn- 
ders came by. I could not help saying to 
him : * How shall I thank you for what you 
have done for us to-day?' 'Well,' said 
he, ' I do not like to hear my country 
abused, but that last thing that you said, 
that's the truth.' That last thing was, I be- 
lieve, a simple assertion of the right of the 
people to think and speak freely." 



218 



IX 

GARRISON AND EMERSON 

These two men were almost exactly the 
same age; for Emerson was born in 1803 
and Garrison in 1805. The precocity of 
Garrison, however, who became one of the 
figure-heads of his day at the age of twenty- 
four, and the tardy, inward development of 
Emerson, who did not become widely 
known till almost twenty years later, seem 
to class them in separate generations. 
Each of the men w^as a specialist of the ex- 
tremest kind; Garrison, devoted to the vis- 
ible and particular evils of his times, Emer- 
son, seeking always the abstraction, and able 
to see the facts before his face only by the 
aid of general laws; Garrison all heart, 
Emerson all head; Garrison determined to 
remake the world, Emerson convinced that 
he must keep his eyes on the stars and wait 
for his message. Each of these men was, 
nevertheless, twin to the other. Their 
spirit was the same, and the influence of 
each was a strand in the same reaction, a 
219 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

cry from the same abyss. Emerson, no less 
than Garrison, was the voice of Abolition, 
and the dying Theodore Parker names him 
as a prophet. I should sum up Garrison^s 
whole life-work in one word. Courage. 
And I cannot find another word, except 
Courage to sum up Emerson. 

The function of Garrison was to crack 
up, to dissolve. He cannot bear to see two 
men agree about anything, he cannot tol- 
erate assent; toleration is the enemy, tol- 
eration is the sin of the age. In like man- 
ner is Emerson a sphinx who puts questions 
to his age. His thought cannot be under- 
stood without a thorough pulling down of 
extant prejudices. Both men are dissolv- 
ents. With Emerson, this was idea; with 
Garrison, it was function. Garrison does, 
he knows not what, — he talks foaming, he 
cannot fit two conceptions together; but he 
is generally, and on the whole, the agent of 
dissolution and re-crystallization. Emer- 
son has only one note. He sits helplessly 
on his perch and utters his note ; — waits 
a while, and again utters his note ; and he is 
everywhere and always the agent of disso- 
lution and re-crystallization. To compare 
the relations of these men to each other 
brings out very vividly the strong and the 
220 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

weak sides of each of them ; for each seems 
to split the age, and show the sutures in the 
skull of the world; each is the key to the 
puzzle, and each is the missing half of the 
other's nature. That they did not under- 
stand one another, that there was no plane 
on which they could meet (except for a 
flash), is a sort of proof, by paradox, that 
they stood for the same thing expressed in 
different symbols. 

Never in all literature has there been such 
a passionate proclamation of the individual 
as Emerson makes ; and one of the few men 
that ever lived, who best fulfills Emerson's 
ideal picture of the influential individual, is 
Garrison. It is indeed strange to reflect 
that Emerson's life was given up to pictur- 
ing the strong man who sheds all positive 
influence upon his age, and receives nothing 
from it, and yet to remember that Garri- 
son's activity in real life was uns3mipathetic 
and even repulsive to Emerson. 

The fame of the two men is unequal ; be- 
cause Emerson had about him a dry glint 
.of the eternal, and his mind was a unity; 
whereas Garrison was a professional agi- 
[tator and his mind was sometimes at odds 
^with itself. The power that counts to- 
wards fame seems to be the power of vision. 

221 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

A man with vision leaves behind him a clear 
picture, consistent with itself, easily under- 
stood, popular, enduring; and though there 
be but few strokes in the sketch, his thought 
carries. The practical man, though he have 
the heart of the Samaritan, and do the work 
of a Titan, deals in more ephemeral sym- 
bols and is sooner forgotten. There was 
no single contemporary whose nature cov- 
ered the divergent fields of both of these 
men. The Anti-slavery Cause was always 
badly crippled for lack of a philosopher; 
and Emerson's influence has always stood in 
need of more animal life as a vehicle to 
float it towards mankind. Let us review 
the points at which the careers of the two 
men touched each other; remembering all 
the time that any age is a unity, that all men 
who live in it are members of each other, 
and that the Unconscious is the important 
part of life. 

Emerson, after the loss of his first wife, 
followed by a breakdown in health and a 
year of gloomy travel in Europe, returned 
to Boston in 1833, a frail man of thirty, 
with a theological training, the tastes of a 
recluse, and an immense, unworldly ambi- 
tion. To live in a village, to write in his 
journal, to walk in the woods and ruminate, 
222 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

— such was to be his existence. The or- 
ganic reticence of Emerson has all but con- 
cealed the strong current of purpose that 
ran beneath the apparent futility of his ex- 
ternal life. He was indeed a man of iron ; 
and both he and Garrison might be com- 
pared to Ignatius Loyola in respect to their 
will. Emerson writes in his journal in 

" The philosophy of Waiting needs some- 
times to be unfolded. Thus he who is 
qualified to act upon the public, if he does 
not act on many, may yet act intensely on 
a few; if he does not act much upon any, 
but, from insulated condition and unfit com- 
panions, seems quite withdrawn into him- 
self, still, if he know and feel his obliga- 
tions, he may be (unknown and uncon- 
sciously) hiving knowledge and concentrat- 
ing powers to act well hereafter, and a very 
remote hereafter." " A remote hereafter," 

— this was ever in Emerson's mind. He 
feels himself to be an outpost or advance 
guard of future wisdom. " It is a mani- 
fest interest which comes home to my bosom 
and every man's bosom," he continues a 
page or two later, " that there should be on 
every tower Watchers set to observe and 
report of every new ray of light, in what 

223 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

quarter soever of Heaven it should appear, 
and their report should be eagerly and rev- 
erently received. There is no offense done, 
certainly, to the community in distinctly 
stating the claims of this office. It is not 
a coveted office : it is open to all men.'* 

Never for one moment v^as Emerson's 
mission far from his thought. His fear of 
approaching it, his excessive reverence for 
it, is due to his artistic instinct; just as Gar- 
rison's blatancy about his mission, — the 
same mission, — is a part of Garrison's lack 
of artistic instinct. With that gleam of 
practical sagacity which distinguished him, 
Emerson had resigned from the Church at 
the first whisper of coercion. He was a 
free man. He was freer than Channing. 
He was freer even than Garrison; for Gar- 
rison kept founding Societies which gave 
him endless trouble. Emerson's early and 
unobtrusive retirement from office shows us 
an amusing exchange of roles between the 
two; for in this instance Emerson, the 
recluse, knew the world better than Garri- 
son, the man of action. But Emerson 
knew the world only in spots. His diary 
shows us a mind that is almost callow. 

" Never numbers," he writes, " but the 
simple and wise shall judge, not the Whar- 
224 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

tons and Drakes, but some divine savage 
like Webster, Wordsworth, and Reed, 
whom neither the town nor the college ever 
made, shall say that we shall all believe. 
How we thirst for a natural thinker." 
Emerson's '* natural thinking " leads him to 
collocate the names of great men very un- 
expectedly and somewhat mysteriously. 
Entries like the foregoing seem more like 
the work of a man of twenty than of thirty. 
We must note in the following not only the 
lack of emotional life which is implied: we 
must note also its perfect intellectual poise. 
" You affirm," says Emerson in his jour- 
nal, "that the moral development contains 
all the intellectual, and that Jesus was the 
perfect man. I bow in reverence un- 
feigned before that benign man. I know 
more, hope more, am more, because he has 
lived. But, if you tell me that in your 
opinion, he hath fulfilled all the conditions 
of man's existence, carried out to the ut- 
most, at least by implication, all man's pow- 
ers, I suspend my assent. I do not see in 
him cheerfulness: I do not see in him the 
love of natural science: I see in him no 
kindness for art: I see in him nothing of 
Socrates, Laplace, of Shakespeare. The 
perfect man should remind us of all great 
225 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

men. Do you ask me if I would ratHer 
resemble Jesus than any other man? If I 
should say Yes, I should suspect myself of 
superstition/' 

This passage is like the stalk of the pie- 
plant without the sap. But nature had 
gifts in her lap for the youth that penned 
it; and imagination can detect some sort of 
power even here. Here is at least a crea- 
ture who will test other persons by him- 
self, and not himself by others. The lack- 
ing element seems to be experience, — ex- 
perience of persons, experience of litera- 
ture, experience of emotion. He has the 
coldness of crystal, but also its transparent 
purity. You would not suspect the man 
who writes thus of holding a pastorate over 
souls, — of secretly regarding himself as a 
bishop and an apostle to lost sheep. Yet 
such was the fact. A care for men, a love 
of mankind, is the motive power in him. 

Emerson is a man whom we are obliged 
to understand all the time by the light of 
what only breaks out of him once in seven 
years and endures but for two seconds. By 
the spark of this betrayal we know him: 
witness the opening of his Cooper Union 
address which I shall quote shortly. 

The Abolitionists, of course, made a de- 

22(i 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

scent upon Emerson in their diocesan 
rounds, — for they visited and proselytized 
everyone. May and Thompson, two of 
Garrison's lieutenants, called upon Emerson. 
Their mission was incomprehensible to 
Emerson, who writes in his journal : " Our 
good friend, Samuel J. May, may instruct us 
in many things." He admired May but not 
Thompson, of whom he says: " He belongs 
I fear to that great class of the Vanity- 
stricken. An inordinate thirst for notice 
cannot be gratified until it has found in its 
gropings what is called a cause that men 
will bow to ; tying himself fast to that, the 
small man is then at liberty to consider all 
objections made to him as proofs of folly 
and the devil in the objector, and, under 
that screen, if he gets a rotten egg or two, 
yet his name sounds through the world and 
he is praised and praised." 

Any one who has followed May and 
Thompson through good and evil report, 
who has felt the heat and depth of their 
devotion to truth, must almost wince at see- 
ing what effect a visit from them produced 
upon the chill-blooded young parson who 
sat in his meager study, reading his thread- 
bare library in the village of Concord. 

We are brought to see by such anecdotes 
227 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

as this that Anti-slavery was a sort of spe- 
cial illumination. The greatest saints lived 
without an understanding of Abolition till, 
suddenly one day, Abolition broke out in 
their hearts and made them miserable. 
Abolition was a disease, — the disease 
caused by the flooding of withered natures 
with new health. The infection jumped 
from one man to another. Genius and tal- 
ent had nothing to do with it ; learning and 
piety seem to have been immune to it. 
Emerson was no nearer to an understanding 
of it than if he had been a clerk in a drug- 
shop. He had, moreover, a dry disposi- 
tion, — a cold wind seemed to blow out of 
him, — and the sweat and unction of emo- 
tion were always antipathetic to him. 
Nevertheless Emerson thought about the 
Abolitionists. It cannot be said that he 
thought about slavery. He neither saw nor 
knew much about slavery. But he looked 
out of his window and saw Garrison and 
the Abolitionists shouting in the streets. 
They invaded his musings : they troubled his 
solitude. He tries to shelve them in his 
mind by a final analysis ; but he never quite 
suits himself, and so tries again. His lec- 
ture on " The Times " in 1841, is in reality 
a lecture upon Garrison and Garrison's mul- 
228 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

titudlnous causes. The rather old-maidish 
young Emerson was disgusted by the mis- 
cellaneous and ramping enthusiasm of Gar- 
rison. He says, for instance, in the lecture 
on " The Times " : 

" These reforms are our contemporaries ; 
they are ourselves ; our own light and sight, 
and conscience ; they only name the relation 
which subsists between us and the vicious 
institutions which they go to rectify." 
This is complimentary to the reformers: 
they have at any rate, discovered the evils. 
But Emerson goes on almost immediately: 
" The young men who have been vexing so- 
ciety these last years with regenerative 
methods, seem to have made this mistake; 
they all exaggerated some special means, 
and all failed to see that the Reform of Re- 
forms must be accomplished without means. 
. . . Those who are urging with most 
ardor what are called the greatest benefits 
to mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, con- 
ceited men, and affect us as the insane do. 
They bite us and we run mad also. I 
think the work of the reformers as innocent 
as other work that is done around them; 
but when I have seen it near I do not like it 
better." 

It appears, then, through these last quoted 
229 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

phrases, that Emerson thinks the reformers 
are quite off the track, after all. But in the 
final sentence of the essay there is another 
phrase to the effect '* that the highest com- 
pliment man receives from Heaven is the 
sending to him its disguised and discred- 
ited angels." So Garrison, it appears, was 
a disguised angel, after all. The essay on 
** The Times " is a glacial attempt to explain 
the function of the Reformer. It contains 
valuable ideas, and beautiful ideas; but it 
leaves unbridged the chasm betv^een the ap- 
parent odiousness of the reformer and his 
real utility. It explains nothing: it demon- 
strates only that Emerson did not under- 
stand these particular " times " but was 
greatly puzzled by them. Dr. Holmes has 
said '' that it would have taken a long time 
to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson's 
teachings in this lecture had been accepted 
as the whole gospel of liberty." " But," he 
adds, " how much its last sentence covers 
with its soothing tribute ! " 

Sometimes in reading this essay on " The 
Times," it has seemed to me as if the whole 
of it were tinctured with condescension; — 
just as the paragraph about Christ quoted 
above is unpleasant through its crudity of 
feeling. There is, however, no condescen- 
230 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

sion in either passage. Emerson was the 
last man in the world to feel condescension. 
If he had had an inkling of what Garrison's 
activity signified he would have shouted ap- 
proval. Emerson's humility was abun- 
dantly approved in the outcome. Let this 
be noted: Emerson was a perfectly coura- 
geous person; regard for appearance has 
nothing to do with the ineffectuality of his 
perceptions. Upon Lovejoy's murder, in 
1837, Emerson " sternly rejoiced," says Dr. 
Edward W. Emerson, " that one was found 
to die for humanity and the rights of free 
speech and opinion " ; and soon thereafter 
Emerson delivered a lecture in Boston in 
which " he suddenly looked the Boston audi- 
ence in the eyes " . as he said these words 
about Lovejoy, " and a shudder seemed to 
run through the audience, yet unprepared 
for this bold word, for a martyr of an un- 
popular Cause." Dr. Emerson cites this 
episode twice over, once in the Journals, 
and once in the Works, and he adds, " of 
course Lovejoy had other defenders in Bos- 
ton." Yes, Lovejoy certainly had other de- 
fenders in Boston; and it is fortunate for 
us that he had. 

Emerson's words of approbation for 
Lovejoy seem to have been carefully 
231 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

weighed, and he does not mention slavery. 
He belonged, in fact, to that large class of 
people who were shocked because free 
speech was murdered in Lovejoy's murder. 
Now, inasmuch as Emerson was lecturing 
before very conservative people, even this 
reference to " free speech and opinion " 
called up before the imagination of the audi- 
ence the spectre of the Abolition Cause; — 
and a shudder warmed the room. Even so 
remote an approval of Abolition as this, was 
thought to be very bold in Mr. Emerson. 

I believe that had it not been for Garrison 
and his crew, Mr. Emerson would have seen 
nothing in the street as he looked out of 
his window in the years 1833- 1840. He 
would, therefore, have turned his eyes upon 
the heavens, and continued to develop a neo- 
platonic philosophy. The thing which he 
did develop during these years, and while he 
was thinking a good deal about Garrison, 
and wondering what was the matter with 
Garrison, — the outcome of Emerson's re- 
flections upon Garrison, — was that picture 
of the Just Man which runs through Emer- 
son's thought; that theory of the perfect 
man, the Overman, the Apollonian saint, 
who accomplishes all reforms without using 
any visible means. 

2yz 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

In 1844, Emerson gives us a glimpse of 
this Overman in an essay entitled " The 
New England Reformers." The essay 
records a lack of progress in Emerson's 
thought, and shows that he had as yet no 
idea of the difference between Anti-slavery 
and the other many and clamoring reforms 
of the day. Like the essay on " The 
Times" it contains beautiful ideas, but be- 
trays ignorance of this particular matter, — 
Anti-slavery. " The man who shall be 
born," he says, " whose advent men and 
events prepare and foreshow, is one who 
shall enjoy his connection with a higher 
life, with the man within man; shall de- 
stroy distrust by his trust, shall use his 
native but forgotten methods, shall not 
take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall 
rely on the Law alive and beautiful which 
works over our heads and under our 
feet." "If," he says on another page, 
" we start objections to your project, oh, 
friend of the slave, or friend of the poor 
or of the race, understand well it is because 
we wish to drive you to drive us into your 
measures. We wish to hear ourselves con- 
futed. We are haunted with a belief that 
you have a secret which it would highliest 
advantage us to learn, and we would force 
233 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

you to impart it to us, though it should 
bring us to prison or to worse extrem- 
ity." 

This last passage is an echo of the ad- 
mirable fooling of Plato's dialogues. But 
it is not in phrases like these that men show 
their understanding of a subject like 
slavery. The time shall come when the fire 
shall descend on Emerson and he shall tear 
his mantle and put dust upon his head. If 
you would see how a man speaks when the 
virus of Anti-slavery has really entered his 
veins, you must turn to the address that 
Emerson delivered at Cooper Union in New 
York on March 7th, 1854. It is the Fugi- 
tive Slave Law that has aroused the seer 
and wrenched him from his tripod. He 
hates to leave his study, yet must leave it. 
His voice is strident ; he forgets the ameni- 
ties, and begins speaking almost without 
making a bow to his audience, and while he 
is still removing his overcoat. 

" I do not often speak to public questions ; 
— they are odious and hurtful, and it seems 
like meddling or leaving your work. I 
have my own spirits in prison; — spirits in 
deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do 
not. And then I see what havoc it makes 
with any good mind, a dissipated philan- 
234 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

thropy. The one thing not to be forgiven 
to intellectual persons is, not to know their 
own tasks, or to take their ideas from 
others. From this want of manly rest in 
their own and rash acceptance of other peo- 
ple's watchwords, come the imbecility and 
fatigue of their conversation." He contin- 
ues to speak in haste, making use of the 
personal pronoun, — belligerent, reckless. 
" I have lived all my life without suffering 
any known inconvenience from American 
Slavery, I never saw it; I never heard the 
whip; I never felt the check on my free 
speech and action, until, the other day, when 
Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, 
brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the 
country. I say Mr. Webster, for though 
the Bill was not his, it is yet notorious that 
he was the life and soul of it, that he gave 
it all he had : it cost him his life, and under 
the shadow of his great name inferior men 
sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for 
it and made the law. I say inferior men. 
There were all sorts of what are called 
brilliant men, accomplished men, men of 
high station, a President of the United 
States, Senators, men of eloquent speech, 
but men without self-respect, without char- 
acter, and it was strange to see that office, 
235 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

age, fame, talent, even a repute for honesty, 
all count for nothing." 

Emerson next discovers that Webster 
(formerly one of his gods) has never said 
anything of any consequence anyway. " If 
his moral sensibility had been proportioned 
to the force of his understanding, what lim- 
its could have been set to his genius and 
beneficent power ? But he wanted that deep 
source of inspiration. Hence a sterility of 
thought, the want of generalization in his 
speeches, and the curious fact that, with a 
general ability which impresses all the 
world, there is not a single general remark, 
not an observation on life and manners, not 
an aphorism that can pass into literature 
from his writings." 

Emerson now has the disease of Anti- 
slavery. The proof is that he feels obliged 
to take some sort of personal action. He 
feels responsible to the community for the 
educated classes. *' The way in which the 
country was dragged to consent to this (the 
Fugitive Slave Law), and the disastrous de- 
fection (on the miserable cry of Union) 
of the men of letters, of the colleges, of 
educated men, nay, of some preachers of 
religion, — was the darkest passage in the 
history." And again : " Yet the lovers of 
236 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

liberty may with reason tax the coldness 
and indifferentism of scholars and literary 
men. They are lovers of liberty in Greece 
and Rome and in the English Common- 
wealth, but they are lukewarm lovers of 
the liberty of America in 1854. The Uni- 
versities are not, as in Hobbes's time, * the 
core of rebellion,' no, but the seat of inert- 
ness." We find no avoidance of the word 
" slavery " in this address. Every other 
word seems to be '* Slavery, slavery!'* 
" A man who steals another man's labor 
steals away his own faculties ; his integrity, 
his humanity is flowing away from him. 
The habit of oppression cuts out the moral 
eyes, and, though the intellect goes on sim- 
ulating the moral as before, its sanity is 
gradually destroyed. It takes away the 
presentiments." And finally in the last 
paragraph, comes a fierce, frank, almost in- 
coherent, acknowledgment of the country's 
debt to the Abolitionists. " I respect the 
Anti-slavery Society. It is the Cassandra 
that has foretold all that has befallen, fact 
for fact, years ago ; foretold all, and no man 
laid it to heart. It seemed, as the Turks 
say, * Fate makes that a man should not 
believe his own eyes.' But the Fugitive 
Slave Law did much to unglue the eyes of 
237 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

I 

men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us 
staring. The Anti-slavery Society will add 
many members this year. The Whig Party 
will join it : the Democrats will join it. 
The population of the Free States will join 
it. I doubt not, at last, the Slave States 
will join it. But be that sooner or later 
and whoever comes or stays away, I hope 
we have reached the end of our unbelief, 
have come to a belief that there is a divine 
Providence in the world, which will not 
save us but through our own cooperation." 
Happy Emerson, who has lived to be so 
moved! Now what is it that has brought 
Emerson to this pass? It is Daniel Web- 
ster's defection. Webster's defection was 
like the falling of a mighty tower that 
jarred whole classes and categories of men 
into an understanding of the Slave Power. 
It did what neither Lovejoy's murder, nor 
the Annexation of Texas was able to do: 
— it waked up " the better element." To 
this group, the better element, Emerson be- 
longed by education and tradition. He 
crossed the Jordan along with the rest of 
his caste. This was just twenty-five years 
after Garrison's discovery of Immediate 
Emancipation: for these things were hid- 
den from the wise and prudent and were 
238 



GARRISON AND EMERSON 

revealed unto babes. The Abolitionists had 
been studying Daniel Webster for fifteen 
years. They had seen the menace in sticks 
and straws; Emerson sees it in the earth- 
quake. They had then left their desks and 
hearths as he does now, and had talked on 
street corners to any one who would listen 
about " slavery, — slavery, slavery ! " 

Now it seems to me clear that Emerson 
had, from the beginning, been dealing with 
souls in slavery. This was the vision he 
saw, a vision which was consequent upon 
the Slave Epoch, a vision of moral slavery. 
And the man of Emerson's imagination, 
who is to set free these slaves is Emerson 
himself. This Overman is certainly a 
beautiful person. He does suggest truths, 
— this Apollo-like person of Emerson's, — 
he is valuable and he is beautiful. All of 
Emerson's abstractions and summaries of 
moral idea bear somewhat the same sort of 
relation to the real world that this Overman 
bears to Garrison. They are spirit-pictures, 
drawn from the life, a life never fully un- 
derstood in its throb and passion; yet the 
pictures are given with such accuracy, such 
nobility, such power, that they speak for- 
ever. They are the artistic outcome of our 
Anti-slavery period. Garrison set a great 
239 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

brazen trumpet to his lips and blew; and 
the walls of Jericho fell. Garrison dies, 
and his trumpet sounds no more. Never- 
theless, the small, inner, silver trumpet of 
Emerson caught and sounded the same 
note; and it continues to sound the note, 
shaking down the walls of inner Jerichoes 
in men of later and ever later generations. 



240 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE: 
SUMMARY 

In every great fluctuation that takes place 
in human society, — whether it be a moral, 
a political, or even an industrial phenome- 
non, — force converges upon some one man, 
and makes him the metaphysical center and 
thought-focus of the movement. The man 
is always a little metamorphosed by his of- 
fice, a little deified by it. He is endued with 
supernatural sagacity, or piety, or resiliency. 
He is fed with artificial life, through the 
fact that thousands of men are sustaining 
him by their attention and in their hope. 
Thus in 1858, Lincoln suddenly became the 
great general-agent of political Anti- 
slavery in America; because his brain was 
exactly fitted for this work, which deified 
him quite rapidly. So of a hundred other 
cases of deification or demonization : — 
leaders seem to be grabbed, used and flung 
aside by immaterial and pitiless currents of 
force, which had as lief destroy as benefit 
their darlings. Witness the career of 
Stephen A. Douglas. 

241 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Garrison was the leader of Abolition 
from its inception to its triumph. His 
genius, and his activity kept it a unity, de- 
spite the incessant tearing and crumbling 
that were the normal accompaniment of its 
spreading influence. " I have never met the 
man or woman," said Wendell Phillips in 
1865, " who had struck any effectual blow 
at the slave system in this country, whose 
action was not born out of the heart and 
conscience of William Lloyd Garrison." 
There is a certain verbal exaggeration in 
Phillips' statement; but the idea conveyed 
is true. Garrison's preeminence is incon- 
testable. In agitation, as elsewhere, the 
great man eats up the little man ; he sets the 
clock in the little man's bosom by his own 
chronometer, — or rather, all this is done 
for both of them by the stress of the times. 
There never was a leader of men more 
completely consumed by his mission than 
Garrison. His life was sucked up into An- 
ti-slavery. He had no attention for other 
things. How he obtained food and lodg- 
ing for his family during all these years is 
a mystery. From time to time, it seems, 
his friends would relieve his wants, or pay 
a doctor's bill. He was supported by his 
Cause: the benevolence which he generated 
242 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

fed him. At the close of the war Garrison 
occupied a position of great eminence; and 
he could have cut a figure in public had he 
wished it. For, although the Abolitionists 
and Lincoln's Administration found some 
difficulty in coming to understand each 
other at the outset, they were in moral 
union before long; and they fought the war 
through together. " It was my privilege 
once, and once only, to talk with Abraham 
Lincoln, at Petersburg, Va., April 6, 1865," 
says Daniel H. Chamberlain. " His face, 
his figure, his attitudes, his words, form the 
most remarkable picture in my memory, and 
will, while memory lasts. I spoke to him 
of the country's gratitude for his great de- 
liverance of the , slaves. His sad face 
beamed for a moment with happiness as he 
answered in exact substance, and very 
nearly in words : * I have been only an in- 
strument. The logic and moral power of 
Garrison, and the Anti-slavery people of 
the country and the army, have done all.' " 
Garrison had no worldly ambition; he 
even declined to assist Governor Andrew 
with political advice in the days of the tri- 
umph of Abolition at the close of the war. 
He neglected and refused to write his own 
memoirs though ofl^ered large sums of 
243 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

money to do so. He sank into private life 
as easily as if he had truly been the benevo- 
lent, self-educated clockmaker of a Pick- 
wickian kind, whose type he physically re- 
sembled. The storm which had engen- 
dered this dragon passed over, and left be- 
hind it a placid old man. 

We must now revert to certain anti- 
bellum doings of the Abolitionists which 
had a profound influence upon the diplo- 
matic history of the country during the 
war. While the demoniac Garrison was, in 
1833, stirring his American caldron with 
his right hand, he reached over with his 
left and set a-going another vessel in Eng- 
land, which vs^as destined to be of enormous 
importance to this country. Garrison 
made five journeys to England, namely in 
1833, 1840, 1846 and 1867, and 1877. In 
the first, he clasped hands with all the 
philanthropists in England who were, at 
that time, assembled to witness the fifial tri- 
umph of the law abolishing Slavery in the 
West Indies. His immediate object in this 
journey was to unmask the American Col- 
onization Society before the British public, 
and to bring the non-conformist conscience 
of England into true relations with Ameri- 
can Abolition. He visited the venerable 
244 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

Clarkson, he met Wilber force, Zachary 
Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, Thomas Fowell 
Buxton, and many other men and women of 
this kind. At the suggestion of Daniel 
O'Connell he held a meeting in Exeter Hall, 
where O'Connell spoke. Garrison w-as at 
one with these warm-hearted people in Eng- 
land as w^ater is at one wnth water. They 
loved him; they doted on him, and he on 
them. 

As we have seen, George Thompson came 
to America in 1835, as an apostle to the 
Abolition Cause. Harriet Martineau came 
as a traveler in the same year. By her 
writings, and especially by her '* Martyr 
Age in America," she explained to the Eng- 
lish mind the Anti-slavery situation in this 
country. After the year 1835 there existed 
a bond between the philanthropists of Eng- 
land and of America. Constant inter- 
course, the sending of money and articles 
from England to the Cause in America, and 
an affectionate personal correspondence be- 
tween the most unselfish classes in each coun- 
try, led to the consolidation of a sort of 
Anglo-Saxon alliance of the only desirable 
kind, — an alliance between loving and pub- 
lic-spirited persons in each country. As the 
outcome of this international union, which 
245 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

was inaugurated in 1833, a spiritual alliance 
of private persons succeeded thirty years 
later in controlling the diplomatic relations 
between the two countries and in averting 
war. It was, perhaps, the first time in his- 
tory that such a thing could have occurred ; 
and the incident shows us that the influence 
of private morality upon world politics is 
by no means imperceptible. 

In 1840 a good many of the Abolitionists 
went to England to attend a World's Con- 
vention, and to renew their acquaintance 
with O'Connell, Buxton, Elizabeth Fry, the 
Howetts, Elizabeth Pease and others. The 
later visit of Garrison to England in 1846, 
was due to a picturesque episode in Anti- 
slavery history. A free church in Scotland 
had accepted money subscribed by slave- 
holders in Charleston; and Edinburgh be- 
came for a few weeks the focus of Anti- 
slavery agitation. " Send back the money '* 
was placarded upon the streets, while Eng- 
lish and American Abolitionists flocked to 
the fray. Garrison took this occasion to go 
to London and attend a World's Temperance 
Convention, then in session at the London 
Literary Institute. Immediately thereafter 
he organized an Anti-slavery League, and 
held " a real old-fashioned Anti-slavery 
246 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

meeting," the first that had ever been held 
in London. The astonishing freedom with 
which he dealt out blows and caresses to 
the British public, the perfectly popular, 
jocular, boisterous tone of his speech on 
this occasion reminds one of Luther, and 
shows a new side to Garrison's powers. 
His success with the public was great. 
Now it happened that there was still an- 
other World's Conference going on in Lon- 
don at that time, namely a meeting of the 
Evangelical Alliance, which was a union of 
protestant clergy from various parts of the 
world. Garrison and Thompson took, of 
course, no share in the deliberations of these 
clergymen, but watched their proceedings 
with interest. The slave question w^as al- 
ready burning hotly in the Alliance. The 
contested point was whether slaveholders 
were to be admitted to fellowship. After 
much wrangling and reference to commit- 
tees, etc., the Alliance decided for the ad- 
mission of slaveholders. Imagine the state 
of mind of Thompson and Garrison! 
They instantly called a meeting at Exeter 
Hall under the auspices of their own new- 
born League: and they proceeded to de- 
nounce the Evangelical Alliance, — yes, they 
denounced it out of existence, — to the great 
247 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

encouragement of the whole Abolition 
movement in America and elsewhere. This 
procedure occupied but a few days, and 
shows how much an active man can do, even 
upon a foreign soil, when he is dealing with 
matters peculiarly within his own province 
of understanding. 

Garrison's personal relations with the 
British philanthropists can best be under- 
stood by reflecting upon his social isolation 
in America and upon the natural warmth of 
temperament in himself and in these Eng- 
lish friends. " I did not hear without great 
emotion that you are returned to England, 
and I look forward with great happiness to 
meeting you in these better times," writes 
the Duchess of Sutherland in 1867. Har- 
riet Martineau wrote just before her death 
in 1876: "I can say no more. My de- 
parture is evidently near, and I hold the pen 
with difficulty. Accept tlie sympathy and 
reverent blessing of your old friend, Har- 
riet Martineau." 

" I have watched his career with no com- 
mon interest, even when I was too young to 
take much part in public affairs ; and I have 
kept within my heart his name and the 
names of those who have been associated 
with him in every step he has taken." It 
248 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

is John Bright who spoke thus, at the great 
Garrison banquet given in London in 1867. 
The voice of Bright here spoke for that 
v^hole v^orld of hberal sentiment in Eng- 
land which first rose to power through the 
passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. It 
spoke for Glasgow and Edinborough, for 
Lancashire and Yorkshire, — for the new 
Burgherdom which came into the world her- 
alding religious freedom, popular education, 
and the protection of the humbler classes. 

Garrison was better known to the work- 
ing classes in Great Britain than in his own 
country. " During my visit to England," 
said Henry Ward Beecher, speaking in 
1863, '* it was my privilege to address, in 
various places, very large audiences, and I 
never made mention of the names of any 
of those men whom you most revere and 
love, without calling down the wildest dem- 
onstrations of popular enthusiasm. I never 
mentioned the names of Mr. Phillips or Mr. 
Garrison, that it did not call forth a storm 
of approbation." 

It was through all this intercourse be- 
tween the Abolitionists and the liberals of 
England that there grew up that under- 
standing which the middle classes of Eng- 
land possessed as to the nature of the Amer- 
249 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

ican struggle in i860 to 1865; and which 
alone averted the recognition of the South- 
ern Confederacy by the British Govern- 
ment. In reading the life of Charles 
Francis Adams, it has always been a sur- 
prise to me to find how well informed the 
cotton spinners, operatives, and small 
tradesmen of England were upon the very 
point which the Governing classes were so 
unwilling to understand. The story of the 
support given to the Northern cause by the 
cotton-spinners of Lancashire, who were be- 
ing starved to death by the blockade of our 
Southern ports, is among the most moving 
stories in history. They could not be in- 
duced to protest or to ask their own Govern- 
ment for relief against that blockade. 
They would not take sides against the 
United States Government whose action 
was crushing them, because that Govern- 
ment stood for the freedom of the slave. 
The tale resembles the story of some siege 
at which not merely the safety of a city, 
but the fate of all humanity is at stake. 
These humble creatures saved us. It was 
due to their fortitude that Great Britain did 
not openly recognize the Confederacy. 
Had the masses of England sustained the 
official classes in regard to the American 
250 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

question, some sort of intervention by Eng- 
land in American affairs would in all prob- 
ability have followed. 

The Englishmen whose influence edu- 
cated and sustained the working classes 
upon this whole matter were John Stuart 
Mill, John Bright, Richard Cobden, Lord 
Houghton, William E. Forster, George 
Thompson, Goldwin Smith, Justin Mc- 
Carthy, Thomas Hughes, Herbert Spencer, 
Professor J. E. Cairnes, — as well as the 
Gurneys, Buxtons, Webbs, and Clarksons 
of the previous generation: that is to say 
they were the heart and conscience of Eng- 
land of which Garrison had found himself 
to be a part in the early days, and by which 
the whole Anti-slavery movement had been 
comprehendingly followed during thirty 
years. The lower classes in England saw 
that the battle raging in America was their 
own battle, and that upon the maintenance 
of the cause of free labor the progress of 
popular institutions all over the world 
largely depended. 

When Garrison visited England in 1867 
he was greeted as the Giant of an Idea 
ought to be greeted. Public receptions and 
lunches were given in his honor in London, 
Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and 
251 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

Glasgow; and many names of note were to 
be found subscribed under words of wel- 
come. Charles Darwin wrote, twelve years 
later, to young Garrison : " Thank you for 
the memorials of Garrison, a name to be for- 
ever revered." I would not cite the fetes 
and ovations given to Garrison in London 
in 1867 as proving more than they do prove. 
We ought to examine the list of guests at 
the banquets and read the current newspaper 
editorials by the light of the events of that 
day, before deciding that Garrison's virtue 
was alone responsible for all this enthusi- 
asm. I believe that Great Britain seized 
upon the London Banquet to Garrison as 
an opportunity for making a sort of amende 
for her unfriendly conduct during our cri- 
sis; and that persons attended this break- 
fast in 1867 who would not have been found 
at such a celebration if it had occurred in 
June, 1863. But whatever may have been 
the intentions of the Englishmen who, in 
1867, gave Garrison a banquet, they did 
right to honor him; and their action gives 
the cue to posterity. It was Garrison who 
saved this nation. In his youth he gave us 
the issue through which alone salvation 
could come; and by his life he created the 
spirit through which that issue triumphed. 
252 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

When the strands of this great web are 
brought together, they are seen to be as 
light as gossamer: the whole expanding 
Cosmos of Slavery may be drawn back- 
ward through a gold ring. Slavery in the 
North American Colonies was an outcome 
of that geographical remoteness which has 
so much hampered our progress. Slavery 
was a form of outrage which could linger on 
in outlying corners of the globe, long after 
it had become impossible in the centers of 
Western civilization. It had no legal in- 
ception in our Colonies : it was older than 
law. But it grew with our growth. The 
arrangement between the Colonies which 
goes by the name of the '' New England 
Confederation of 1643 " contained a clause 
for the rendition of fugitive slaves. Be- 
fore the year 1862 there was never a mo- 
ment in our history when slavery could have 
been abolished by the popular will. The 
United States Constitution of 1789 could 
never have been adopted by the Southern 
States had it not contained clauses protect- 
ing slavery. Slavery was in the blood of 
our people. During the thirty years, from 
1830 to i860, while the system was being 
driven out of the blood of our people 
through the power of the New Testament, 

2SZ 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

there grew up a natural illusion, that the 
whole matter was one of municipal law. 
In reality the matter was one of influence, 
in which law only played a part. 

The American temperament had thus 
been under the harrow of iniquity for two 
hundred years. During all this time 
slavery had been commercially an error, in- 
tellectually a blight, in every social aspect 
a poison. The toxin of it engendered in 
the Southerner that subtle quality, known 
and feared by the Greeks, — an un-awed self- 
will. This quality is a mere inability to 
give way, and shows that the inner will of 
the man is closed to the great creative force 
of the universe. If he cannot let this force 
in, he will be destroyed by it. Nature con- 
spires against him; humanity joins hands 
against him. His fall is certain. 

The toxin of slavery engendered also in 
the Northerner the correlative sin to self- 
will, namely, a mean submission. The 
Southerner could not give way: he did not 
know how to yield. The Northerner could 
not stand fast : he always yielded. If you 
subtract the slave, who stands between these 
two samples of damaged temperament, you 
will still have a symbol of the institution of 
slavery in these two divergent attitudes of 
254 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

degradation. Do not seek for the fault in 
conventions or in Constitutions. There is 
no fault: there is only a moral situation, 
having a geographical origin. 

During all this time the stars were fight- 
ing against slavery. They fought behind 
clouds and darkly for two hundred years; 
and at last their influence began to develop 
visible symptoms of cure. A very small part 
of life or history is ever visible, and it is 
only by inference that we know what pow- 
ers have been at work; but in 1829 it is 
plain that some terrible drug is in operation 
in America. Whether this hot liquid was 
first born in the vitals of the slave we do 
not know. It seems to me that the origin 
of it must have been in the slave himself; 
and that it was mystically transmitted to 
the Abolitionist, in whom it appeared as 
pity. We know that the drops of this pity 
had a peculiar, stimulating power on the 
earth, — a dynamic, critical power, a sort 
of prison-piercing faculty, which sent 
voltages of electrical shock through human- 
ity. It is plain that all this conductivity 
to the ideas of Abolition was a part of 
Abolition. The sensitiveness of the South 
to criticism was also a part of Abolition. 

There began, therefore, in about 1830, a 
255 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

course of shuttling passion, which seems 
ever to repeat itself and to run upon a cir- 
cuit. A wave of criticism from the North 
arouses violent opposition at the South : this 
awakens the North to new criticism. As 
the result of each reaction the South loses 
a little and the North gains a little. Now 
the relative numbers and resources of the 
North were, during all this time, increasing 
so rapidly that nothing but hypnotism could 
keep her in subjection to the Slave Power. 
And the days of hypnotism were plainly at 
an end ; the days of shock and question were 
come. Whatever the South did, turned out 
to be shocking, and to be mistaken. What- 
ever the South did, returned to plague the 
inventor. The Missouri Compromise of 
1820 was a Southern victory and jarred 
upon the Northern conscience a little. 
Nine years thereafter arises Abolition. 
The offer of a reward for Garrison by the 
State of Georgia in 1831 weakened the 
South; the elaborate attempts to suppress 
the Abolitionists in 1835 weakened the 
South; the Annexation of Texas weakened 
her. The Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the 
Repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the invasion of 
Kansas by the Border Ruffians, the Dred 
256 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

Scott Decision, — each one of these things, 
though apparently a victory, proved in the 
end to be a boomerang, which operated to 
v^eaken the South and to awaken the North. 
On the other hand the North seemed to be 
protected from the consequences of moral 
error. The greatest illustration of this is 
the case of John Brown, whose crimes were 
at first not credited, and later were sanctified 
by contemporary Northern opinion. 

Curiously enough, the political control of 
the South went on growing stronger and 
stronger while the basis for this control, — 
its hold on the Northern imagination, — 
was growing weaker and weaker. In other 
words, the Southern leaders always won: 
their cause always lost. Some Nemesis 
was working out. The mccaniqiie of each 
successive step in the process was always the 
same. The weapon of the South was her 
threat of disunion. This threat seems to 
have had the effect of a spell upon our 
Northern ancestors. Disunion was in their 
opinion too horrible to be named, and much 
too terrible to be executed. The mere 
thought of it shattered Northern nerves. 
A world without the United States Consti- 
tution seemed to Northern men like a world 
before God's arrival, — chaos come again. 
257 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

It was this threat of disunion that carried 
the Missouri Compromise in 1820, gave the 
moral victory to the NulHfiers in 1832, car- 
ried the Compromise measures of 1850, re- 
pealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854, 
elected Buchanan in 1856, and ruled the 
fortunes of the Republic in collateral mat- 
ters between these crises. 

The North was so accustomed to knuck- 
ling under at the sound of that threat that 
when Secession actually took place in i860, 
— when the worst had happened and the 
Union was irretrievably shattered, — the 
North begged for more compromises: it 
proposed to woo the South back through 
new concessions. It offered another Fugi- 
tive Slave Law which should be embodied 
in the Constitution. The triumphant Re- 
publican Party seems to have been stunned, 
and could not believe that the long- 
dreamed-of catastrophe had actually oc- 
curred. It will be observed that both North 
and South upon this occasion merely played 
their stock parts. The South, through the 
habit of self-will, seceded. The North, 
through the tradition of self-abasement, 
begged her to come back. 

Then occurred a thing which no one ex- 
pected. The submerged courage, the abased 
258 



FOREIGN INFLUENCE 

self-assertion of the Northern people broke 
suddenly into expression. Fort Sumpter 
was fired on, and every one of twenty mil- 
lion people received a shock that gave him 
a new kind of an organ for a heart. The 
dramatic nature of this climax was greatly 
enhanced by the slow manner of its coming 
on, by the dreadful waiting of the previous 
months, by the cowardice and inefficiency of 
the politicians, and by the dumbness of all 
the oracles. Garrison, at this juncture, is 
as empty as the prophets of Baal : he knows 
nothing. Earth's remedies have failed. 
No one is abreast of the situation. Lincoln 
only waits. At this moment, when the ca- 
tastrophe is in the sky and the thud of Fate's 
footsteps can be hqard, there occurred that 
thing which Herndon had spoken of in a 
prophetic letter one year earlier. Hern- 
don wrote his last letter to Theodore Parker 
on December 15, 1859. ''The Republicans 
in Congress," he says, " are grinding off the 
flesh from their kneecaps, attempting to con- 
vince the South that we are cowards. We 
are cowards, that is, our representatives are. 
. . . The South is now catechising the 
North. To this question, ' What is the true 
end of man? ' it stands and shiveringly an- 
swers, ' The chief end of man is to support 
259 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISOxN 

the nigger institutions, and to apologize to 
despots.' The Senators are all on their 
knees. So are the Representatives. Let 
them shrive themselves there, and mankind 
will avenge the humiliation in the future. 
This is God's constant mode of operation. 
The race will pull the trigger which the in- 
dividual refused to touch. God will cry to 
the race * Fire ' and it will fire." 

Never did the calculating human intellect 
more completely break down than in the 
whole legal history of America. Never did 
so much abihty prove so impotent to under- 
stand or to assist a social development. Sal- 
vation came in spite of all men, — through 
the invisible. Courage came back with the 
war; — a certain great, gross courage, — 
mixed with carnage and barbarity as the 
courage of war ever must be, — yet still 
courage. This was the precious part of the 
war; for this courage was but a sample 
thread of a new kind of life which trusts 
generous feelings, relies upon the unseen, 
is in union with the unconscious operations 
of the spirit. 



^60 



EPILOGUE 

The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we 
are not saved. — Jeremiah 8:20. 



EPILOGUE 

The Anti-slavery epoch presents a perfect 
example of the rise, progress, and victory of 
a moral cause. This cause was so obvious, so 
inevitable, its roots were so deep in human 
nature and in history, that its victory was 
assured from the beginning. In studying 
it, all our wonder and all our attention may 
be reserved for the manner of its rise, the 
form of its advance, and the mode of its vic- 
tory. 

Historians are apt to apportion praise and 
blame to the Abolitionists, to the Southern 
leaders, to the Republican Party, to the gen- 
erals during the war, to the troops upon one 
side or the other in the terrible conflict. But 
such appraisements are either the aftermath 
of partisan feeling, or they are the judg- 
ments of men who have not realized the pro- 
fundity and the complexity of the whole 
movement, — the inevitability not only of 
the outcome, but of the process. That Gar- 
rison should have disapproved of the entry 
of Abolition into party politics, and that he 
should have raved like a hen upon the river 
263 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

bank when he saw the ducklings he had 
hatched rush into poHtical waters; that the 
great intellect of Calhoun should have been 
driven forward by a suicidal logic into 
theories that were at war with the world's 
whole inheritance of truth; that Webster 
should have been now right, now wrong, or 
the Supreme Court now enlightened by a 
flickering compassion or again overshad- 
owed by the Spirit of Crime ; — such facts 
as these are parts of the great story, and can 
hardly be handled or sampled by themselves, 
hardly separated, even for a moment, from 
their context. 

The private judgments which we are 
tempted to utter concerning critical phases 
or moments in any great cycle and sweep of 
destiny, are never conclusive, never impor- 
tant. We cannot know the truth about any 
of these things. No one can be sure that 
Garrison did not exert greater influence upon 
practical politics through his dogma of non- 
resistance than he could have done through 
an active participation in government. No 
one can state the precise value of the Liberty 
Party and the Free Soil Movement ; no one 
can weigh the influence of '' Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," All that we can be sure of is the 
great movement itself, which emerges, 
264 



EPILOGUE 

winds, coils, progresses, now gleaming and 
flashing beneath the surface, now emerging 
above the surface, of social and political life 
in America like a great golden serpent, — 
a mysterious all-pervading influence, su- 
pernal, mythologial, — typifying the regen- 
eration of a people. 

The Legend is so vast, and moves at such 
a pace from beginning to end, that no two 
minds can agree about its details. Yet that 
Legend is at all points illuminated with the 
inner light of poetry and religion. It has 
an artistic unity, it moves like a very com- 
plicated sonata; so that we who regard it, 
somehow see our own souls in it, and draw 
out of it only what we put into it. The 
Anti-slavery Legend will reflect the spiritual 
history of any mind that looks into it ; it is 
a mirror of the soul. It is a sort of the- 
saurus of moral illustration. The reason is 
that we were deeply diseased; we were in 
immense danger; we were covered with 
scales, and our mind was threatened. Our 
whole civilization was iridescent with the 
same poison. But we were healed, we 
were saved. And in the course of our 
cure every process and function of health 
was revealed. 

To talk about the present is always diffi- 
265 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

cult. The past is easy; but when in the 
course of any discussion we approach the 
present, we approach the unknowable. The 
present can by no means be brought into his- 
toric focus. If then we look about us in 
America to-day having in our minds some 
reminiscence of history, let us beware of 
certitude: let us touch upon what we see 
with merely a hint and a query. I will, 
then, do no more than name three shapes 
which I see or seem to see and which may 
be thought of as apparitions or as passing 
fancies ; — the first is a kind of specter, the 
second is a visitation from on high, the 
third is a prophecy. They are namely : the 
Decay of Learning, the Rise of Love, and 
the ultimate Revival of Spiritual Interests. 
The dying off of our older cultivation, 
which gives so much concern to all intelli- 
gent persons in America, does not indicate 
death. It is due to two causes, one of 
them being the historic, and withering in- 
fluence of isolation and of commerce; the 
other being the present preoccupation of 
our noblest minds with philanthropic work. 
New life is at hand, though it exist in 
forms which the intellect has never grasped, 
and can never grasp. Before, however, 
speaking of the future, we must look back 
266 



EPILOGUE 

once more upon the discouraging side of 
life in America — on the decay of learning. 
From an external point of view, the Anti- 
slavery epoch can be very simply seen as the 
epoch during which America was returning 
to the Family of European nations from the 
exile which her connection with slavery had 
imposed upon her. The struggle over 
slavery while it lasted left her citizens 
neither time nor attention for general edu- 
cation. In 1830, we found ourselves iso- 
lated and it took us thirty years of work to 
break down the barriers between ourselves 
and the modern world. The intellect and 
passion of the country was given up during 
this time to a terrible conflict between pro- 
phetic morality on the one hand and the un- 
profitable sophistries of law, politics and 
government on the other. Our attitude 
towards Europe was unintelligent; our ex- 
perience in ideas (other than prophetic 
ethics and Constitutional Law), was nil. 
The consequence was that the American 
fell tremendously behind the European in 
general cultivation. 

Now the period after our return to social 

life, — the period, namely between 1865 and 

the present time, — coincides with the rise 

of modern commerce, so that we no sooner 

2^ 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

got free from one enemy to the soul than 
we were fastened upon by another — ^and 
that other the half-brother and blood rela- 
tion of the first. I will not try to analyze 
America nor define her relation to Europe. 
I will only point out our most dreadful de- 
fects, and this only as a prelude to mention- 
ing our hopes of salvation. 

I confess that a certain hard-eyed cold- 
hearted look in the American sometimes 
causes me to remember that Slavery was al- 
ways Commerce, and that Commerce is to 
some extent always Slavery. Such great 
wealth as has been created in America since 
1865 would have hardened the eyes of any 
generation that looked on it. We have in- 
deed been born to calamity in America, and 
our miseries have come thickly upon us. If 
you will walk back across the whole history 
of the world, you will find that respect for 
learning has never before fallen so low as it 
has fallen in the United States to-day. If 
you start anywhere in Europe and trace your 
way back to ancient Egypt, you will find no 
age without its savants, its thinkers, men who 
know something of the past, living some- 
times in caves and sometimes in drawing- 
rooms, yet always, in a certain sense, the 
publicists of their times. These are the 
268 



EPILOGUE 

men through whom, to some extent, re- 
ligion, education, and the traditions of 
spiritual life are transmitted from age to 
age. There have always been enough of 
such men in every age to secure popular re- 
spect for the idea for which they stand, 
the idea of continuity. There has been no 
real break in European culture. During 
the dark ages the most visible and most 
powerful influence upon popular imagina- 
tion consisted in the monuments of a gigan- 
tic past. Indeed, for many centuries there- 
after, the overwhelming influence of an- 
tiquity cowed the world. That element has 
endured in European education in the form 
of a reverence for the past. It stands 
behind every man as a sort of sounding- 
board in his mind, an invisible chamber of 
consciousness that gives resonance to his 
voice. 

If to-day you fall into casual conversation 
with almost any European, you will feel the 
influence of these vistas of education. The 
man's mind is inured to thought. What 
you say to him is native to his soul. He 
has heard something like it before. He 
knows of the existence of the Empire of the 
Intellect. He is interested in the spiritual 
history of the world. All this illumination 
269 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

is no personal merit In the individual you 
speak to. He has lived near to the scholar, 
the musician, the painter, the antiquarian, 
the philologist, the mathematician. 

It happened that a series of misfortunes 
so widowed America that we have all but 
lost the past. Much baggage was jettisoned 
in the original transit across the sea, 
much lost during our colonial and frontier 
period, and finally — we were stripped 
bare by the pirate Slavery, and marooned 
for seventy years in a sort of Babylonian 
captivity. I think there is enough in all 
this to account for the bleakness of Ameri- 
can life as contrasted with European life. 
I think that the emotions must in youth 
be fed upon a sort of pabulum that comes 
down out of the past, — songs, aspirations, 
stories, prayers, reverence for humanity, 
knowledge of God; — or else some dread- 
ful barrenness will set in and paralyze 
the intellect of a race. The question some- 
times forces itself upon me, Is not the Ger- 
man citizen of the second generation, who 
walks the streets of New York to-day, more 
truly a barbarian than his Gothic ancestor 
who invaded Europe in the fourth century 
A. D., and whose magnificent vernacular 
is preserved in Ulfilas' translation of the 
270 



EPILOGUE 

Scriptures? In piety, in knowledge of 
poetry, in reverence, the Goth was more 
advanced than his American descendant. 
I say, the Suabian peasant of to-day seems 
to me to be superior to the American farmer 
in many of those things that make life deep 
and cause society to endure. 

To cut loose, to cast away, to destroy, 
seems to be our impulse. We do not want 
the past. This awful loss of all the terms 
of thought, this beggary of intellect, is 
shown in the unwillingness of the average 
man in America to go to the bottom of any 
subject, his mental inertia, his hatred of im- 
personal thought, his belief in labor-saving, 
his indifference to truth. The state of mind 
in which commercial classes spend their lives 
is not that of pure, self-sacrificing spiritual 
perception. The commercial mind seems, 
in its essence, to be the natural enemy of 
love, religion, and truth ; and when, as at the 
present moment in America, we have com- 
merce dominant in an era whose character- 
istic note is contempt for the past, we can 
hardly expect a picturesque, pleasing, or 
harmonious social life. 

Much is lost sight of, much is forgotten 
among us; much is unknown that in any 
European country would be familiar. For 
271 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

instance, this very man, William Lloyd Gar- 
rison, is almost forgotten among us. He 
lived a life of heroism and of practical 
achievement ; the beauty of his whole course 
was extraordinary, and his type of character 
is very rare. Had he lived in Europe he 
would have been classified at once among 
the great figures of his own generation. 
Indeed he was so classified from across the 
sea. His character would have been prized 
thereafter as a national possession. But in 
America all that the educated man of to-day 
knows of Garrison is that he was one who 
held impractical views and used over-strong 
language during the Anti-slavery struggle. 

All this feebleness, whose evidences I have 
been reviewing, comes, I believe, from a 
central deficiency of life in the American 
people. It is not a thing which can be 
cured in the college, or in the school, or in 
the drawing-room; though the cure will 
show in all such places as fast as the great 
patient improves. 

During the very epoch (the decade suc- 
ceeding the close of the war) when our 
intellectual blight was at its worst, there 
began to appear among us compassionate 
persons founding newsboys' halls in the 
Five Points, prison angels, and police court 
272 



EPILOGUE 

visitors, saints knocking at the doors of the 
poor, — men filled with love and pity. This 
new gospel of love now absorbs whole 
classes of people in American life, and 
swallows the young as the Crusades once 
swallowed them. I hear schoolmasters and 
learned men complain that their most bril- 
liant classical scholars insist upon doing 
settlement work the moment they graduate. 
Why do the young people of both sexes 
take this course? What planetary influ- 
ence depletes the exhausted ranks of 
scholarship, and makes traitors of these 
trained minds to the cause of learning? 
In their new career their old education goes 
apparently for nothing. They themselves 
cannot tell you. And yet they are justified. 
These young people are being governed by 
that higher law which governed St. Fran- 
cis, — the law which he also knew how to 
obey but could not explain. Our young 
people express by their conduct a more 
potent indictment of the cuhivation and 
science of the older, dying epoch than could 
be written with the pen of Ezekiel. The 
age has nothing in it that satisfies them: 
they therefore turn away from it: they 
satisfy themselves elsewhere. In so doing 
they create a new age. The deeper needs of 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

humanity can only be met slowly. It re- 
quired several hundred years for the mean- 
ing and importance of St. Francis to be- 
come apparent. To his contemporaries he 
seemed to be a disciple sent to the poor; 
yet his influence ultimately qualified the art 
and letters, and tinged the philosophy of 
life of several centuries. 

All these new saints of ours, — new 
Christians, and loving persons who crowd 
the slums, and rediscover Christ in them- 
selves and in others, — lack power to ex- 
plain; they merely exist. Through them, 
or rather through the heart which they in- 
fuse, literature and intellect will return, art 
and mental vigor will be restored to us. It 
would seem that the bowels and viscera of 
society must be heated first, and thereafter 
in time, — it may be a century or two, — a 
warmer life will reach the mind. These 
new grubs that creep out of the ground, 
these golden bees that dart by us in the sun- 
shine, going so directly to their work like 
camp nurses, are more perfect creatures 
than we are, in that they deal with human- 
ity as a unit. You and I are nothing to 
them. They have a relation to the whole. 
They are living in a beam which we do 
not see, they are the servants of a great 
274 



EPILOGUE 

cure which we cannot give, and do not un- 
derstand. 

So also in regard to the Anti-slavery 
Movement, the importance of that Move- 
ment comes from the fact that it meant 
piety, truth, and love. The rest is illusion. 
In a certain sense the slaves were freed too 
soon. That short-sighted element in the 
philosophy of Abolition, which saw Slav- 
ery as the Antichrist (whereas the spiritual 
domination of evil was the real Antichrist), 
ended by putting Slavery to its purgation 
so quickly and so convulsively that many 
features and visiting cards of slavery were 
left behind in the nervous system of the 
people. This was no one's fault: it was 
the method of nature. An after-cure was 
necessary ; and we have been undergoing an 
after-cure, and need more of it. 

I regret the loss of the old cultivation; 
and yet I know that none of our older cul- 
tivation was ever quite right. The Ameri- 
can has never lived from quite the right 
place in his bosom. Nevertheless if we 
are but patient the loss will be restored to 
us tenfold. We are living in the age of a 
great regeneration. There is hardly a man 
in whose face I do not see some form of it. 
New hope is with us. Very different is 
275 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

our mission from that of the Abolitionist, 
though both are forms of the same power. 
Anti-slavery was the narrow, burning gate 
of heaven, seen by a few men, who fought 
their way towards it, paying with their 
lives for every step in their progress. 
Crags overhung them: society hated them: 
every man was their enemy. In our new 
crusade no one is our enemy. The spirit 
is felt in all men. In some, it moves in the 
heart crying, Abba, Father. Others it 
leaves speechless, but makes their lives 
beautiful through unselfish labor. Still 
others it illuminates with visions, so that 
we see men and women who live like angels, 
running up and down in the celestial light, 
passing forward and back between God and 
man, bringing health to many. In other 
hearts it has broken the old shackles of 
prejudice, and shown to them the common 
bond that lives in all religion. The 
churches have been growing liberal, — for 
the first time in the history of Christianity. 
Other classes of men glow with an enthu- 
siasm for science which is becoming a form 
of worship for truth, differing chiefly in 
name from religion. It is as if a truce 
had been sounded in that antique war that 
has raged forever over creed form and 
276 



EPILOGUE 

scientific theory, and as if every one were 
standing in silence, thinking of the realities 
which lie and which have always lain be- 
hind the noisy dogmas and the certified for- 
mulas of human thought. The wrecks of 
many creeds are being clashed together 
like the cakes of ice in the Hudson during 
a great February thaw; while the strong 
river bears them all forward in triumph. 

Great and small, learned and unlearned 
meet upon that plane of common humility 
which is their only meeting ground. It is 
a period when the power and first-hand 
mystery of life is recognized on every side, 
and when the. conventions and lies that dam 
and deny that power are for the time being 
widely broken down. I do not say that 
the dams will remain down forever. Peo- 
ple are building at them all the time. Trade 
interests, personal selfishnesses are indefati- 
gably at work like ants, — contesting every 
inch of the damage, inventing new dykes, 
denying that any permanent change has 
taken place. 

Let us be glad that we are born in this 
age and within the swirl and current of the 
new freedom. Let us do each our share 
to leave the dams down, and not build 
them up in our own bosoms; for it is in 
277 



'/' 



^ 



WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON 

peoples' bosoms that all these dams exist. 
We must permit the floods of life to run 
freely. It is not from any one of our re- 
forms, arts, sciences, and churches but out 
of all of them that salvation flows. What 
shall we do to assist in this great process? 
What relation do we bear to the move- 
ment? That is the question which requires 
a lifetime for its answer. Our knowledge 
of the subject changes constantly under ex- 
perience. At first we desire to help vigor- 
ously; and we do all in our power to assist 
mankind. As time goes on, we perceive 
more and more clearly that the advancement 
of the world does not depend upon us, but 
that we, rather, are bound up in it, and can 
command no foothold of our own. At last 
we see that our very ambitions, desires and 
hopes in the matter are a part of the Su- 
pernal Machinery moving through all things, 
and that our souls can be satisfied and our 
power exerted only in so far as we are 
taken up into that original motion, and 
merged in that primal power. Our minds 
thus dissolve under the grinding analysis of 
life, and leave behind nothing except God. 
Towards him we stand and look; and we, 
who started out with so many gifts for men, 
have nothing left in our satchel for man- 
kind except a blessing. 
278 

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